I tried this strategy (setting 1% military, 99% social with all planets focused on research) after reading about it here in the forums. I'd like people to read and try to verify this data. Here's what I found:
- You can't do this at the start of the game, since you wouldn't be able to build any colonizers at your home planet until social projects are done, so starting off with 50% 50%, or alternating between building social structures and building colony ships is necessary (but 50% 50% is easier, so why not do it)
- You have to set every single planet to research focus, or else you won't get any research done. So even at the start, when you have 50% military 50% social, your home planet should be focused on research. Also, setting a newly colonised planet to research focus will yield 2 tubes.
- The reason you are setting 1% military is to let planets with starports actually build ships. When you have a slider set to 0%, no planet will have anything to do with that area unless set to focus on it (and we are already setting every planet to research focus by default). When you set things to 1% military and 99% social, because social production overflow (unused hammers) goes into military, any planet capable of building ships and not building a social project will have their entire industry building ships. However, when a social project shows up (upgrade, new building, etc), it will soak up the entire production and stop your starport production.
- How this works is, some factory industrial points (shields/hammers) get turned into tubes through the research focus. I'm not sure of the exact %, but it doesn't matter if the factory is working on a social/military project or not, and a factory definitely provides research tubes when you have 0% research funding but set the planet focus to research. I'm going to say a factory produces 30% of its industrial points as research points, because I saw this trend, but I wouldn't swear by that at gun point (but it is definitely something like 30% according to what I calculated).
- At this point, you might think, "I'd rather build labs then, if a factory is 30% efficient producing tubes, why not go straight out labs where you need em?". Well, a few things. First off, let us say you have a research center that is able to produce 8 tubes. ABLE being the key word here. Now, unless you have your spending sliders set to 100% research, that center will never actually produce 8 tubes. It will produce something like 8*researchspending%. However, when you have 1% military 99% social, a factory that has a capacity to produce 8 hammers WILL produce 8 hammers (I have checked various games and made calculations to confirm this). So, let's take a look at this example: one planet with 100 hammers worth of factories (planet factory), the other with 100 tubes worth of research centers (planet research). With 1% 99% setup, the factory planet will produce 30 tubes. The research planet can only produce 30 tubes if the empire wide spending is set at 30% research (the rest divided however between various planets).
- The above example sets us a good check point, 30% research spending. Including and below that mark, a planet full of factories will actually outclass a planet full of research centers. Above that research spending, the planet full of research centers will outclass the factory planet.
- In the real game, the answers are not that simple. First of all, a planet set to full out factory will develop and upgrade rapidly (even exponentially faster) compared to a research planet. Anyone who has played a neutral alignment rushing to neutrality centers knows how long those research planets take to develop, even with 1-2 factories built to help speed up the process. Factory planets do not only get more factories to improve faster, their factories are funded 100%, rather than 60% in the case of a research planet strategy (if, for example, you set your research spending to 40%), increasing their speed of development more. So in addition to the 30% situation, the factory planets wins out here as well.
- Power plants. Fusion powerplants provide 25% industry bonus, equal to research coordination centers. The top tier power plants provide 100% industry bonus (I think). This industry bonus helps the research tube production as well. So, after fusion powerplants, if the factory planet has a powerplant, the 30% research spending mark starts increasing. Dramatically. I mean, at the top tier power plants, with 100% industry bonus, the research planet would probably need 50% or more spending to catch up to the factory planet (not exactly 60% because we're assuming the reseach planet is building a research coordination center).
- Someone playing a 1% 99% 0% economy with no research centers does not have to go past the Xeno research project. Since you are not building any labs, you do not need to upgrade them, and you do not need to research the tech for them.
- A factory planet doing research can instantly turn into a ship producing AND research planet in just 1 turn, provided your economony can support the additional ship building. All you have to do is turn 1 tile into a starport. The research planet could never turn into a ship building planet just like that.
Can someone verify this data? I have used several saves, with a game where I actually played all out factory planets with 1% 99% 0% and compared it to my saves from the classic style. If this is actually valid, I feel like there's something wrong going on here.
