I would not be against having a multiplier on the option screen for tech costs. That could be useful in scenarios you want to start with Earth at 10.000.000.000 people for example, although this obviously have other implication as well.

In these situations it is just easier to imagine that your 500 million are equivalent of 10 billion and multiply all population for RP reasons by twenty. That will keep the balance of progression to a more reasonable level.

I also use a few other tricks in my RP campaigns. I prohibit huge changes in how you change labs from one area to another. I charge that faction with a one time wealth cost of half what that lab produce in RP in a year for doing so (using SM mode). I also limit the total wealth accumulation of a faction to its yearly wealth income. This will curb a lot of gaming with changing lab between projects on a whim and make myself feel it when I do. Limiting total wealth is also a must on conventional starts in my opinion.

Not to mention the time it must take to run through the hellfire of AMM-spam going on in the 6.4 test campaign.
Honestly it's a good thing he's back playing through the new version, so many new features are coming as a result of this work. Not to mention bug fixes.

Well, eventually NPRs will have a research capacity similar to the player, then we will not be able to RP a slow research rate by slowing it ourselves without getting into a disavantage against NPRs and a feature to setting the general research dificulty for a hole scenario would be very usefull.

+1

But...WHERE is STEVE?

Waitn for 6.4.

Waitn for Aurora II.

Change Core program..

Ah..if Steve return to LOVE Aurora we see a change...otherwise, not.

R.I.P.

The issue you're running into isn't that the AI NPR's are advancing thier tech as fast or faster than you are.  At present the AI NPR's don't do much research.  Steve is working to change this.  

What you are seeing is the result of something different that he did do though.  AI NPR's start with something like 3x the RPs the player race has.  Steve has discussed this elsewhere as something he's looking at changing once the he irons out how the AI does research.  

Guys, you are missing the point. I am not trying to cripple research but to have a tool that I could use for certain scenarios.

I can of course hack a database but I am not that good to avoid cripling it + as you mentioned the game has parametres hardcoded now.

I can't slow myself via research because that would leave every other race at normal pace. The tool I am pleading for would make it harder for every race in the universe to research and thus keep the balance it has now.

Again, this is already in the game.  Don't advance your "research rate" tech and don't build additional research labs and your rate of advancement will be very slow after you've acquired the first few levels of tech.  Keep your start population down will limit your start research points and research labs.  Use a convention start with a small population and things really slow down. 

Sorry, no need in my eyes for a mechanic to cripple research any further.