Devote more of your budget to research, or (re)start your game with research on "very fast". I always set my game for "very fast", and it takes long enough for me to get weapons techs.

Ah yes, thank you. Setting the tech rate to very fast made the game so much more enjoyable for me! Now it's time to up the difficulty... muahahaha...

And setting my economy to focus on research made things MUCH easier. I don't know why I hadn't messed with it already.

Yeah... But I'm too impatient for that. I need 3-5 week techs or else I feel like I'm falling behind. :/

Mumblefratz once made a good point that had me use "noral" as my reseach rate from then on. I used to use fast or very fast, but then he wrote about how the AI doesn't ever change after it picks a tech to research but a human player might. This means that on slower rates, the AI will not change their strategy and may be stuck researching a long tech while you can pick up others if the need arises. Although I don't too often change the techs I'm researching mid-way. I think that was the idea behind what he had said.

Also, on higher difficulties it is harder to keep up with the AI, especially early on. Haveing a very fast rate will just make you even further behind since the AI's bonus will be multiplied to a higher starting rate. At least thats the way I think of it.

However, if you see your games taking decades to play, want to try out a tech victory or play on normal difficulty levels or with huge research bonuses, then go for the fast rate. Its all whats most fun for you.

I always fall behind in weapons techs and I've now been twice saved but stealing a grteat tech from an invasion. The drengin were whipping me and i got their current best weapon, skipped a few levels of mass drivers; enough that I permanently abandoned the lasers I was working on. Your ability to NOT research weapons depends on your relations with other races and the difficulty you play on. If you feel you can stay out of wars longer go for planetary development. Thats what I do, only speeding up the weapons once i need to while only dabbling when i don't.

The AI is VERY stingy about trading weapons techs and a few others... like space mining. Jeez you'd think they were the game winning techs. You can sell them to the AI for A LOT even if they have no asteroid mines.

Well, the numbers you've given me are actually too low to work with.

12 industry times 33% funding equals 4 industry for both social and military.  Taking 25% of this we get 1 from each of them, which is then multiplied by 80% for 0.8, which gets truncated (social and military values are fed to research separately, at last check, so they truncate before they add).  Additionally, 33% funding of 8 research gives you 2.67, which truncates to 2.  You're getting 2 research from your labs, and none from focusing.  In this scenario, if you simply had your military funded at 50% and your social funded at 50%, each would focus 1.2 over to research, which would give you the same 2 research output that you have now.

Granted, you will notice some difference, because you either have a 14 industry/14 research initial colony (TA version) or a 24 industry/24 research civilization capital.

The problem with focusing on research when you have labs is that, in general, you will have less social and military to focus from, both due to not having as many (if any) industry buildings, as well as generally having them funded less.  As you can see from the above numbers, running everything equally doesn't necessarily grant you any kind of advantage, either.

If we run the numbers with 100 industry and 100 research (to make things easy), at equal funding, we have the following:
33 research from labs
6 research from focused social
6 research from focused military
24 social
24 military

For a total of 42 research.  We can achieve this in our example by running research at 42%, and by splitting the remaining 58% evenly to military and social, we get 29 industry in each as opposed to 24 above.  We could even do 58% research, which is a 38% increase over our above numbers, if we were comfortable with having 24 social and 24 military.

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The bottom line is this, if you're going to focus:
-If you have primarily labs, focus on military or social (whichever one you need).
-If you have primarily factories, focus on research.
-If you have anything approximating equality, fund intelligently and only focus on planets that need it.

Thank you Sole.  Good post and very helpful.

I think its better to focus on general techs that help combat, such as medium scale building, miniaturization, logistics, engine techs. 

You need to have enough of a military to impress the minors and to hold off the more powerful civs.  Making cheap ships (tech wise) with low offense and high defense might be an alternative here.   I don't like to commit early to high tech weapons, because the AI (at high levels) will counter them.

You can sometimes trade for weapon techs to get you a jump start.  The deal may be lopsided, but its ok as long as you are trading with a weak civ or a minor.  (and tech brokering is off)  Try to avoid any trades with the more powerful civs.  You won't get a good deal, and you will be even further behind technologically.  You almost always have to research Planetary invasion for yourself.  (as mentioned in another thread, temporarily switch to invasion just before you search a civilization graveyard)

If you are evil, researching lasers and then psyonic beams will help for a long time.  (although they are expensive)

Overall, the nerf to weapons research improves the game, by making it necessary to use low tech weapons.  This encourages fleet tactics (like modules), military starbases, and those precious miliatary resource bases.

In the end, nightmare torpedoes still rule of course.