Research and Manufacturing 300k W:300k E:**H:**

[KevlarAxis]

So would this be an accurate description of each of the fields in this thread?

Total Empire Research Potential: The total amount of research that your empire is capable of producing (before adding bonuses) based on the available scientists (which are the ones conducting the research) in your empire. These scientists are stationed at facilities that have labs in order to generate research. The type of research produced is dependent upon the labs that are present in the facility.
E.g. In a space port that has all 3 labs, the scientist(s) at the facility will split their research equally between the available labs; or a space port has, say, only energy labs, so that facility, if staffed with a scientist(s), will contribute that scientist's full potential to energy research

Total Research Capacity:The total *capacity* for each tech discipline (weapons, energy, high tech) that your empire can handle. Building a facility that had a large capacity for a specific field of research would end up providing the option of transferring scientists to that facility to effectively "specialize" in that area.
E.g. You decide that you want to research ship size quicker than anything else, so you build a couple of facilities that have energy labs exclusively. You transfer scientists to these facilities, and their research potential is directed towards energy research *only*, effectively distributing your "potential research" to a higher percentage in energy research. **It is worth noting that stationing scientists that have a bonus in a particular area in a facility that matches that ability is optimal. Their bonus will not apply if they are not conducting the relevant research.

Actual Output: The final product of your scientists' efforts in the stations that they are researching in. This number is the actual amount of research that you are producing, and incorporates your government bonuses, leader bonuses, location bonuses, and individual scientist bonuses (their character traits, and only applies if they are conducting research at a facility that has labs that correspond to their bonus)
E.g. You have a scientist that has a 10% bonus to weapons research. Their bonus will only apply if they are researching in a facility that has weapons labs, and the more specialized the facility (the more weapon labs it has in relation to the others, preferably 100% weapon labs to maximize the scientist's bonus) the more output you will generate.


Weapons plant, Energy plant, and high tech plant: Each plant manufactures components per "tick", which is 6 days in game. They produce components based on the size of the component. A plant that produces 45000 construction capacity, is capable of producing 450 (45,000 divided by 10) "size" in components every 6 in game days. Each plant only produces components that were obtained through research in it's respective field (any component that is obtained through technology that is researched in the weapons category will only be produced by weapon plants. The same holds true for energy and high tech components/plants)
E.g. A design has 3 titan beams, 10 deucalios shields, and 10 ultradense fuel cells. That is 6 size for each titan beam, or 18 "size" that the weapon plants must produce to complete this design. The deucalios shields would total 100, since each one has a size of 10, and that would need to be produced by the energy plants. The ultradense fuel cells, being researched in the high tech field and having a size of 6, would be produced by the high tech plants and would equal a total of 60 size. Since this example would be less than the 450 capacity of each plant, the components would be built within 1 "tick", and the design would be limited only by the construction speed of the construction yards.

None of this is my own work, other than interpreting the contribution of others in this thread and mixing it with my own common knowledge from casual play. I do not present this as is to be complete or 100% true, my only intention is to try and help simplify these concepts for new players by consolidating the collective wisdom as much as possible. This is something that I feel should have been done by the game creators, or at the very least they could have explained why they chose not to. In any case, any information in this post is subject to change at any point based on clarification of information based on research.

[Bingeling]

I always mess things up with this, but I try anyways. I checked the guide to guides and found a screenshot of the screen at the start of this thread: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3170698

Total empire research potential

Should not in any way or form be connected to your research labs or scientists. It is a size measure of the empire. More population and possible colonies, the higher research potential. It prevents massive research from happening with the 3000M start population.

Total research capacity

Is a "lab count". How many labs (at which performance) do you have in the empire. Scientists are not included in this number. The relative distribution in labs decide the distribution in research output, that is correct. Twice as many energy labs as weapons labs means twice as much research is put into energy.

Actual output

It is indeed the actual output.

Each research area get the best available location bonus which includes scientists at the location. Examples.

You have a 20% weapon research scientist based at the capital spaceport, a capital with no research bonus. This is all that you got in research. You have 20% bonus to weapon research from the capital spaceport.

You still have the scientist at the capital spaceport. You put a weapon research station at a 30% weapon research bonus site. You get a 30% bonus to weapon research, because the weapon site is the best location for that.

You then move the weapon scientist to the weapon research lab. You get a 50% bonus to weapon research, 30% from the site and 20% from the weapon scientist at the research lab at the bonus site.

I believe you need a weapons lab at the location for it to count, but the number of labs does not matter. You can have 50 weapons research labs on the capital spaceport, and a single weapons lab at the research bonus location. The bonus location (with the scientist) still gives 50% bonus. If you move the scientist to the capital spaceport, the research location is still the best with 30% bonus, and the capital is ignored with only the 20% bonus from the scientist.

Research at full capacity

What is needed to research at full speed is enough labs that your Total Research Capacities add up to more than your Total Empire Research potential. Having more does not hurt, but it costs money to build and maintain, and makes it harder to tweak the output by changing the distribution of labs.

It is not very hard to reach this limit, but being aware of it and building extra labs at the very start of the game is a good idea.

In addition you do of course boost research by having more percentage bonuses from research locations, scientists, governments and such stuff.

Weapon plants and the others

This is not a very relevant part of the game. A construction yard needs one of each plant to build the components for the ships. The plants are so efficient that there have been no reports of more than one plant being needed. So you need for instance 10 construction yards to have ship building capacity, but only 1 of each weapon, energy and high tech plant. If you put way more construction yards you may find that you need extra plants, but still not more than 10-15 construction yards for each set of 3 plants.