What you need to do is find the entities folder and then use a text editor such as Notepad to alter the values to your liking. Recommend you create a copy of any files in case you make a mistake.
For global research settings, look at the player entity files, there is one for each faction, I.e. 2 for Advent, 2 for TEC, and 2 for Vasari. In these you will see the military and cultural research values and can alter the requirements of the levels, for example make it so that all research levels are unlocked with just 1 research point, the time the research takes, the tier reward, the cost etc.
This broad setting, once altered, can significantly impact your game but you will have to individually manipulate each file for the factions you want to make changes to, there is no way I know of to alter all at once.
