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There are plenty of Military Research strategies found on the forum but not much seems to have been written on Civilian Research. Anyone want to share what civilian techs they research and why?
Culture, in order to increase alleigance, grant my ships bonuses, hold off hostile culture, and prevent attackers from immediately colonizing planets under the influence of my culture.
Trade Ports/Refineries for increased income rates.
How about mine enhancemetns on medium to larger maps, or the techs that increase population on certain worlds? Do you beleive them to worthwhile?
Get the population increase early on and look at the results after the match. You should see a clear difference between yours and the AI(unless you play against a researcher)
Research like that (also including mine upgrades and whatever race speciffic things you have) permanently increases your income rate.
Basically that means that the longer you wait, the more income are losing. Not getting these early enough can cripple your mid/end game.
It's race dependent, and there's a few threads about different races and aspects of civ tech, too.
Upgrading extraction rates, although the effect is permanent, should only be done when you can spare the time to replenish the crystal used to perform the upgrade. What you don't want to do is spend your last 400ish crystal for that last upgrade to extraction rate and then find you need that crystal to build something that you urgently need.
You can always buy more crystal. I liek the extraction rate techs because they seem to do rather well when you start getting fleet maintence. But I hardly ever go past 2-3 civic labs unelss its gonna be a big long game.
The big problem with civilian tech is crystal. Unless you're on a map where you can procure multiple ice planets early and plant refineries on them, you just can't get this to work because you need many techs all with very high crystal costs. Moreover, like any booming strategy, if an aggressive player bypasses your frontal defenses you can be crippled before this pays off. If you can't get loads of ice planets, you'll be spending so much money on the black market that your military will suffer dramatically and any opponent who isn't an AI will be able to overpower you with ease. I should know, I fell into this trap when I was first learning to play.
Your best bet is, of course, TEC because they get so many trading upgrades and because you can research a discount for the black market (something you won't be able to avoid using to some extent because of the resource imbalances civilian tech focus causes). Advent also works because of their fast teching speed. It'll be slower to get off the ground, but once you have it off the ground it's research times and not cash that become the bottom line.
Well for AI games, I like playing with multiple AI's in FFA. In those kind of games diplomacy related techs are some of my favorites. Buys me time to mass a fleet and not have to do suicidal runs just to keep a cease fire from crumbling.
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