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Research: Advanced Information
Topic Priorities
In the early game, the economic topics are extremely valuable. Try to raise ore/prod to at least level 3 if you started with a tech level lower than that.
- Most species will do several all-mega planets in the early game to boost population levels (faster colonizing). This means economics (credit production) is extremely valuable. Researching Economics also reduces your market disocunt (for all alliance members), allowing for cheaper trading on the Toag Market. At least one person in the alliance should try to get level 9 as early as possible (preferably the Toag or Gorgoth if you have one).
- At level 4 of Economics your megas generally produce sufficient credits to make a credit profit on your planets.
- Few players will build any ships until they have to (usually when they run out of greys). You can ignore ship-techs until such time.
- Economic techs (ore, prod, labs, nano) have an immediate effect on your economy and population growth, but don't affect ship cloning costs unless you design a new ship to clone.
- Shield tech and Weapon tech contribute immediately to shield resistance and penetration respectively, but to increase shield power or weapon power you have to design a new ship.
Description
- Research levels are gained by accumulating 'research points' from laboratories.
- The base cost of gaining a level is equal to the sum of the cost of the two previous levels.
- Each planet you colonize increases the base cost of a level marginally.
- Each level of 'Researching' you gain, reduces the cost of a level marginally.
- Each species has some topics to which they are predisposed (reduced cost) or to which thy have an aversion (increased cost).
- The more levels of technology you have gained in total, the cheaper it is to research the topic 'Researching'.
- Sirnef are not penalized for colony count, and all research topics are cheaper for Sirnef than other species. Sirnef have no research maluses.
Formula for cost of a level
The cost of gaining a level = [sum of two previous levels] + [penalty for number of planets colonised] + [species malus] - [species bonus] - [discount for number levels of researching topic you have]
Research Strategies
- Because the costs to gain the next level increases exponentially as you advance in a topic, you will find that it is cheaper to switch to another topic that is at a low technology level, and gain several levels cheaply in that topic. Put simply: you can research levels 1 through 5 in several different topics for less than it takes to advance from level 8 to 9 in one topic.
- You may ignore certain techs that you do not wish to use, for example, ignore fighter technology if you only intend using missile technology. However, gaining a few cheap levels of fighter technology anyway will reduce the cost of researching the topic 'Researching'. That in turn increases your lab efficiency and reduces the cost of research across the board.
- The most efficient general strategy for researching is therefore to not waste too much time researching one topic to a high level, when you could have raised several topics to a medium level.