RESEARCH BASICS | RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Research
When you begin the game, you will have a limited selection of technology available to you. To improve your chances of survival you must research new technologies and upgrade existing designs. Effective research depends on having a large quantity of research facilities available for your scientists.
Research facilities can only be built on habitable worlds. However, all research facilities work together. If you have 1000 facilities on one habitable planet and 500 on another, your engineers have 1500 facilities at their disposal each round.
Researching a given technology will typically require one or more different kinds of resources. As you upgrade a technology, a greater amount of resources are required to continue research.
At any point you can stop researching a technology. It will retain whatever level of advancement you have researched to. Also, you will not immediately lose the progress you have made toward upgrading it to the next level. Slowly, however, your scientists will begin to forget the research they have done and your progress will begin to drop. Resume research as soon as you can after stopping to minimize the loss.
ATTRIBUTES
When you begin the game, your scientists will have already discovered certain technology such as the Fighter ship design. Other technology, such as Missile Technology needs to be discovered. After you have discovered a technology, you will see that it expands to reveal its attributes. Attributes allow you to customize and enhance different portions of the new technology.
Each technology has one or more attributes you can further upgrade.
For example, the Fighter ship design has an attribute called Thrust. As you improve this, your fighters will move faster. Attributes are independent. Researching Fighter Thrust has no impact on Battle Cruiser Thrust.
TECHNOLOGY TREE
Not all technology is immediately available to your race when you begin. As you discover particular technologies, additional technologies will appear in your list. Certain technologies depend on the discovery of two or more other technologies.
Please refer to the Technology Guide for detailed information about the technology available to you.
The Research Assistant allows you to plan and prioritize research tasks even while you aren't logged into the game. With it, you can plan up to three phases of research. When a phase of research is complete, the next phase becomes the active phase and begins processing.
Note! When using Research Assistant, do not manually adjust research tasks in the Research & Development screen. New tasks will be ignored by the Research Assistant and you may disrupt the tasks in-progress causing the loss of precious development time.
PHASES
In a given phase, you select the technology attributes you want to research and indicate the maximum level to research that attribute during this phase. When all technology attributes have been researched to the levels requested in that phase, the phase is complete and the next one begins.
The Research Assistant allows you to program up to three phases of research at a time.
For example, in the first phase, you may select to research Fighter Load Capacity, Maneuverability and Thrust to several different levels. You may also choose other technologies to research during the same phase, such as Drone Propulsion or Titanium Plating Strength. You could also set phase two to focus purely on Fighter Thrust.
During turn processing, the Research Assistant sets your research tasks to work on those attributes and technologies you defined in the first phase. It is possible for the Research Assistant to over-research a given item. Your research facilities are applied equally to all tasks in a given phase - and if the portion of facilities dedicated to a given task upgrade it beyond what you have specified, the Research Assistant can't stop that - but it will end research on that attribute immediately.
As phases complete, the next phase rolls into place over it. That way, you can continue to define additional tasks for the future in the second and third positions. Phase one is always the work in progress phase.
CHANGING PRIORITIES
At any time you can change the priorities and levels in the Research Assistant. Raising the level will cause tasks to research more. Lowering the level will cause the task to complete sooner. If the level has already been researched, research will stop. Removing a task from the Research Assistant causes it to stop researching that item during this phase.
RESEARCH | RESEARCH BASICS | RESEARCH ASSISTANT
