Research

Research costs no resources to perform, and can be paused and resumed at any time, at no cost.

Research takes longer the higher up the branch you are. For example, the level 2 travel time research, warpgate, takes 3200 research points to complete, whereas the level 1 travel time research, jumpgate, requires only 1600.

Research speed

Research speed is dependent on a number of factors:

• Number of research laboratories as compared to your total number of structures (maximum 20%, for a 20% speed increase)
• Percentage of population assigned to research (maximum 50%, for a 50% speed increase)
• Your race (Cathaar start with the highest research speed, Xandathrii with the lowest)
• Your government (Currently, corporatism is the lowest, democracy is the highest)

Your research can be set back through a covert operation.

The development scan will reveal what technology your target has.

Available research areas

There are seven fields of research in Planetarion.

Space travel

Travel time research reduces the time it takes for your fleets to travel outside of your galaxy. At level 4, this reduces your travel time by 4 ticks.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure research improves your infrastructure, increasing the limit on constructions. At level 4 you can build 250 structures.

Hulls

Bull research allows you to build more classes of ship. Each of the 3 levels grants access to 2 classes of ships (fighters and corvettes, then frigates and destroyers and finally cruisers and battleships). Regardless of the class, structure killers will always become available at the third and last level of hull research. In order to build ships, you need one or more factories factories.

Waves

Each level of research in the waves branch grants a new type of scan. The waves branch has seven levels. You can only perform scans if you have one or more amps.

Core extraction

Each level of research in this branch increases your income from core mining. At level 4 you extract 12000 of each resource per tick. Core extraction is immune to incoming.

Covert ops

Each level of covert ops research grants access to a new covert operation. There are 7 levels of covert ops research. You need |agents in order to undertake operations.

Asteroid mining

You can only mine 100 asteroids without research in this field. Every level of heavy cargo transfers increases this limit. There are 15 levels of research in this field and the highest level allows mining from 10000 asteroids.