Guide to Research Amount
There are a few things you can do. In decreasing order of difficulty (but some of these might take a while):
- Spread your research around – researching all 6 possible projects gives something like a 25% bonus to research points (maybe more? Maybe less? Not sure exactly how the math works)
- Get Engineering Projects from orgs or Skunkworks/Foundry modules in habs. Each of these provides a +5% bonus on researching faction projects.
- Get research bonuses for specific tech areas, such as with Xenoscience Labs or organizations
None of those will add huge amounts of research – best you can hope for without excessive cost is about x3 the normal amount. Still pretty good, though! The following are harder, but can dramatically increase your research output:
- Build research campuses in tier 2 habs. Each research campus adds +100 research. In Mercury, I’ve got +1600 research from two tier-2 orbitals filled with research campuses. Very expensive monetarily, though, but that can be countered with Spoils
- Take over a high-population country and democratize it and introduce lots of knowledge to it. Get its GDP up to 55,000 and its cohesion to 5.
Also advising the nation with a counciler with high science.
It’s mainly based around what countries you control. Controlling USA, India, or China from the onset will give you good starting amounts, and all can reach very high amounts. Creating the EU works as well in terms of Research. Mainly you get more by putting in points too knowledge. The more people in a country the higher it gets.