How do you speed up research?

Building things like research labs and centers and for immediate results, increase your government spending or divert more funds from social and military production to research.

Good suggestions! Also if your a tech junkie you can choose ability bonuses from the outset and an appropreate form of default government (I forget which) . . Oh yes also Scouts and Rangers can find +25% bonus to whatever your researching in an annomaly. For long techs like Dreds Avatars etc thats just pennies from heaven!
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Technologists, I believe.

The first way you can boost your research is in your choice of political party
at the beginning of the game. Choosing the technologists will give you the
biggest boost to research, or choose the universalists for a smaller boost.

When you go to choose the abilities your civilization will have you have the
option of putting some points into the research category. The points you can
spend on improving research are as follows:
Advanced (1 point) 10%
Gifted (2 points) 20%
Master (4 points) 30%
Ultra (6 points) 50%

Throughout the galaxy are anomalies that can be explored with a survey ship.
You start the game with one survey ship and can build more as needed. One of
the affects of anomalies is to boost your research of a technology.

You can also affect the speed of research by raising the percentage of your
taxes that goes towards research.

There are also random events that pop up that temporarily increase the level
of research going on in the galaxy.

When you invade a planet you are sometimes presented with three options. Once
in a while one of the options will give you a research gain, this may or may
not represent other penalties, and of course also affects your alignment.

If you build a starbase on a purple research icon you will get a research
bonus. You can improve how much of a bonus you get by adding modules to upgrade
mining of the resource.

Some technologies you research actually directly benefit your research stat as
well. They are:
Advanced Artificial Intelligence
Genetic Mapping
Hyper Computers
Omni Computers
TerraComputers
Ultra Computers

Best way to boost research through anomalies is to switch from the tech you are researching to the most expensive tech you'd like to research before entering the anomaly. This has the biggest payoff overall. Just switch back to the current tech immediately afterwards.

Do you guide your survey ship around manually and watch for those anomalies? For me the convenience of auto-survey has always outweighed the gains here, but now that I think about it when I come to the big techs like Battleship Technology it might be well worth it.

What anomaly class gives the research boost?

About those: is the benefit you get free? Or does it increase the possible research amount, for which you then have to pay (like soc/mil prod)?

And how do the research buildings work in that regard? Free or to be paid for research points?

Yours wonderingly,

von Schmidt

Ok, thanks for the info. I'll try the technologists next time I start a new game.

Here is a list of all the things that can improve your research ability

http://webpages.charter.net/trevorpowdrell/a_research.htm

You guys all forget the obvious way to increase research. Move the slider.

The other obvious way is to increase your economy. More money coming in is more money for research.