Firstly, I didn't do a Sol start.
Secondly, my campaign was made a little easy by my starting system having a semi-high abundance of minerals. Two of the minor ones are a bit constrained but duranium, mercassium and sorium I don't have to worry about for the foreseeable future.
Not sure if this matters much, but it could be due to the fact that I don't use fighters or PDCs (apart from the starting allocation). My defence is purely ships and I've yet to get into a shooting war. So it's been 7 years pure expansion.
For a 1 billion pop start, Ion engines is a bit slow, but for 4 years, I did not build a single military ship (apart from surveys) and didn't manufacture missiles so wasn't too bothered by it. Essentially, I gambled that the NPR would be non-hostile (and they were) and dumped all my tech into construction/mining rate + research.
In fact, I didn't even start with warp point theory... (although I started it right away)
At 7 years I don't even have enough scientists to use 110 research labs with all the little 5 lab max guys I keep getting. How many academies does that take?
Not many surprisingly, I've had 3 for a while then got 4. I have at least 3 50+lab researchers. I've never had to worry about having too many labs...
Now, I have 11 academies and climbing, since my fleet constraint now is crew... =(
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Actually, I think this might be due to another quirk of the system. What time step do you use? I use a 86 000 construction cycle.
Not sure if that affects officer experience (intuition is saying yes), but I know it affects a load of things, like wasted construction power, as well as civilian sector movement.
Because... tell me, what's your highest governor bonus? I won't bother to check mine, but I do have a 70% construction rate / 55% shipyard rate governor for my homeworld. (and there are three or four around the same range although they're not quite as awesome)
- I also kinda "cheated" on that by creating colonies on system bodies that didn't do anything but train governors.
EDIT:
Jesus. I was 60 years in in my little turtle game before I had 100 research labs. I simply couldn't obtain the necessary corundium and duranium necessary to get the facilities built. I did get 2000 factories sooner, and now have two developed industrial worlds and two research worlds.
Actually that's rather more developed than I am currently. I have a half-baked research world (which is an empty terraformed rock with nothing but labs) and my industrial homeworld.
Made the decision that labs should not take up precious space on a planet that needs to run mines, despite the incredibly painful move (seeing messages to the tune of 19.15 labs sitting idle is >.<). I'm still limited by population.