Research

Research is another major part of your faction and quite possibly, the difference between a Good player and a Great player. There are are 8 major types of researches: Military, Construction, Technology, Energy Production, Population, Culture, Operations and Portals. Each of them has a positive impact upon your faction, here is a sample list of your research screen.

Increase funding

Current research funding : 0

There are 2 different ways to earn research points. One of them is to build Research Centers, or you can also fund your research with energy, by writing the desired amount of energy to spend in the box at the top and clicking on Fund. Note that for each 10 energy you put into research you only get one research point back. All that energy however doesn't have to go into a specific branch of research, it can be divided as you wish, the percents written above are identical to the ones you start out with, if you wish to change them just type in a new number and press change (make sure that after you type in the number you change the rest accordingly so that the total is 100%).

Research Points each have a Networth of 0.002.

If you want you can spend all of your research in one branch, that is up to you, here is a description of each branch of your research.  

Military: Increases the attack and defense of your units, making them stronger and harder to kill in combat. This is very useful if you plan to be attacking a lot of people.

Construction: Drastically reduces the construction costs of both units and buildings, also shortens the time of construction.

Technology: As you may have noticed some units in your units menu are either unavailable or have Tech: +X% cost written under them. That's because your tech. research is not high enough. Again this research is highly recommended if you are going to be attacking a lot.

Energy: This is increases your energy production. But it only increase the initial production and has no impact on population's impact on upkeep (every 350 people your net upkeep decreases by 1 energy). Recommended for those that aren't as warlike as people above and wish to create more and perhaps aid other empire members.

Population: This research increases the growth rate and maximum available population per planet. See here for more about Population

Culture: Increases the effectiveness of your psychics, this is alternative to what Operations research does for agents.

Operations: Works pretty much the same way as Military Research, but affects the attack and defense of your agents rather than military units, this is equivalent of what Culture research does to psychics.

Portals: This research increases the efficiency of your portals. In order to have 100% protection on the planet you have to have at least 1 portal in the system, and the farther you get away from that portal the less protected your planets will be. But as your Portals research goes up your protection also goes up, and it doesn't decrease as much as it did before when you go far away from the portal. Also decreases the upkeep cost of each Portal.

Research Calculators

Notice: These calculators, while useful are somewhat dated. For a more upto date calculator use the research calculator in game

This will calculate how many weeks you will need to obtain a certain level of research, given the networth and the number of Research centers 

This will calculate what % research you will have in a certain amount of time considering that your # of research centers stays the same and the only networth difference is that of the Research points.