Posted by: nuclearslurpee
« on: November 26, 2020, 11:44:20 AM »Current game is 25% research, 150% difficulty, earth starting pop 1.5 billion. Conventional start.
It took me 30ish years to beat my first (tiny) precursor base (with nuclear pulse/improved nuclear pulse). 40 for the first real bases. All the NPRs are stronger than me still. And I would've needed longer, I think, except I stole gas cooled reactors and ion drive tech via espionage.
I still have ships that are 20 years old in service, though they are pretty obsolete. My first rank ships are a decade or less of age; I'm in the middle of a fleet rebuild right now that will move those ships to the second rank.
This sounds close to what I expected, thanks!
-- Words and pictures --
This is the kind of effect on a campaign that I was hoping to see in terms of both the limits as well as how an empire develops.
The interesting thing with research is that research output scales with your industry. Not only are your starting labs scaled to industry, I'm saying here that your industry, and therefore the ability to increase your research rate, usually plateaus after the Earth minerals are eaten up and only only relatively slowly grows afterwards, assuming you spend a relatively equal amount of mines mining each mineral.
Since the reserach rate stays at a similar level for a long time and only grows slowly, the time between tech levels will naturally increase over time. At the start of a game you e.g. usually take two years for a tech, then four years, then eight, and when you're at 16 years for a tech it takes you a century to get through a tech level (simplied assumption here that one researches all techs roughly equally). So there is a natural tendency for research to take longer after the initial rush at the start of a game is over and your number of labs and research times stabilize. Meaning you always get that stage where you don't have to refit your now-obsolete fleet every five years regardless.
If you start with 20 labs you plateau with MP tech, if you start with 50 labs you plateau with internal confinement or something else instead, but in either case you plateau after roughly the same time.
The research modifier just forces this situation sooner, before the stabilization of research rate that usually follows.
This is a good point. So research modifier really only determines the pace of the early game, and basically the tech level at which the slower part of the game becomes dominant, rather than just being a straight slowdown. I hadn't thought of it like that. It also helps to understand why a lower research rate isn't the default, it seems like the default setting gives a faster early game but won't be that fast forever so you do eventually get to the more generational tech levels that make Aurora fun later on.