Research represents the productivity and resources that a civilization spends working new technology. Research is represented by flasks on the Colony Management screen. It costs 1 bc to convert a flask into a technology point. Research is generated primarily by research labs (and their upgraded versions of planetary improvements). Research can be improved by upgrading economic (production) starbases, mining research resources, racial bonuses, random events, by surveying anomalies, and by gaining research treaties from other races (DA feature). Certain planetary improvements will give research bonuses (without directly generating research).
Research spending beyond what you need to complete the current tech is credited towards the next tech in the branch. This makes researching more techs in one turn possible. However, if it's a terminal tech in the tree, extra spending is wasted. For this reason, the best strategy is to micromanage your sliders to devote just the right amount of research to complete the tech. Players have been complaining about this for years.
In the Dark Avatar expansion pack, research works as follows:
- Research buildings and two types of colony buildings give base research. Bonus tiles just add their stated bonus to the base research of the building on that tile.
- Technological Capital, the Omega Research Center and Research Coordination Center add their stated percent of research to base research.
- The player pays the full amount of base research.
- Colonization event that enhances research, production-enhancing modules on starbases, mining research resources, initial race abilities, two trade goods, (in DL) rings around planet and Planetary Improvements technology add their stated percentage of bonus research to base research. Player pays only half of that bonus. The payment is subtracted from the treasury and is not visible on planet mgmt. screen.
- Research output on planets with Extreme environments is NOT penalized.
- Researching technologies increases research cost of other not-yet-researched technologies (research cost inflation). Effect is small (some 2% increase for every tech researched after some 20 early techs, that don't generate inflation).
In TotA expansion was cost inflation for weapons and invasion techs significantly increased to about 20% per researched tech. Unfortunately in late game, where lots of techs are already researched, this makes new weapons techs excruciatingly expensive, costing 5 or 10 times the starting cost. In practical terms that means researching a weapon from level-6 to level-7 costs as much as a complete defense branch to level-7, thus making a counter-counter-design nearly impossible.
- There are some known bugs/glitches regarding research in the DA:
- Planets with rings DO NOT give any research bonus
- The research pane shows only base research, not the actual one with bonuses
- Tech Capital, Omega Research Center and Research Coordination Center DO NOT add more production points when focus is set on production. Only 1/4 of labs' output is converted to production.
- A planet can still generate production points from focused labs' output, despite general empire's production is blocked by being more than 500 BC in debt.
Setting a focus on research[]
When a player sets a focus on research, that field takes 1/4 of base production from factories, and adds that amount to whatever it already has. After that it adds to the new amount all bonuses the planet and race has in that field. Focus DOES NOT transfer the bonus from the Artificial Slave Center to research.
Note[]
- DL game version 1.0x and older have a glitch: as stated by CaretFarmer in this galciv forum thread the actual research bonus granted by racial abilities is actually HALF of what is listed. For example, the Ultra research mod gives a stated 50% bonus, but in practice gives a 25% bonus to research generated.
- This has been fixed in 1.1 - see Racial bonus.