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I was surprised to see the AI build a lab station at the first black hole without even asking. Built it perfectly, no problems.

I do not believe the purple ring you get when selecting a black hole is its event horizon. It is the edge of the accretion disk, the event horizon itself is represented by the ball at the centre of the black hole.

But even so, you can pass a ship directly over this ball and have it come out alive:



I believe this is due to the way the 3rd dimension is abstracted in DW. Although the pixels representing the ship passed over the pixels at the centre of the black hole representing the event horizon this does not mean it was inside the event horizon any more than ships that obscure some of a ordinary stars pixels are "inside" that star. The point where you cross the event horizon is the point where the ship goes boom.

Also, you can build a station quite far away from a black hole and get the full research bonus:


The station furthest from the black hole (Research Station 002) does not get the bonus, other two(Research Station 001 and 003) do:


So there is no need to place your research station that close to the black hole. Although, it could have interesting consequences if another empire decides to attack it...

ORIGINAL: lordxorn

The way I understand it is that based on the size of your empire there is a hard research cap listed on the top left of the research screen. To say 800 is the number on the top left, then the most you can benefit from research bases is 200 in each field. I guess the design intent is that more scientist doesn't necessarily translate to more results. Of course racial effects and government effects will apply.
Also Elliot mentioned before release that it was also their intention to not give really large empires that big of an advantage over smaller ones.

Yes there is a hard cap on the total research your empire can perform at any time. However, it is not pre-split between the research areas eg if you have nothing but 800 worth of high tech research and you have a Total Empire Potential of 800 then you will get 800 research in that area rather than 200. If you have more than the cap the actual amount allocated will depend on the relative amounts of research eg if you have 800 hi-tech as per the previous example and you then build 800 industry and 400 weapons you will then do 320 high tech, 320 industry and 160 weapons research. In my screenshot of the research screen you can see that the actual output for the research areas are different and they are proportional to the maximum potential in that area eg energy actual output=1025*752/(752+738+767+781)K=253.7K=254K.

Yes I should have broken it down more like you have, where you given a detailed report.[:D]

With the latest patch, the shaded area where it is ok to build a research station has been removed.

This shaded area was quite large and plainly indicated where you can place a station, as to why this was removed I have no idea.

I have a hunch it might be a bug Lordxorn!!!  The shaded area is still there sometimes and not other times.  Some Blackholes have a shaded area and some don't, it is rather annoying.

It has to do with if if the blackhole is explorered and if you have a ship currently in sensor range.

If already explored and no ship is in sensor range, you can see the shaded area.