Everyone when they start this game they are always interested with RESEARCH, RESEARCH and RESEARCH

But with research alone everyone will have the same endgame ship

All the stats i will be enumerating here are assuming you don't add crew in the mix and everything is from researched components (things you can build from research)

1945 Energy (with all the relays and energy hog weapons)
6858 hull (without any durtainum brackets ever placed)
3669 shields (without any xcharge cells installed but with 3 aegis shield installed)
6080 attack (with all endgame weapons installed and without tactical officers added)
8832 defence (without any crew added)
7000+ scan
4262 cloak

*all these stats will be the same for us if we all installed everything in our ship and professions are not taken into account.

Artifacts on the other hand improves our ships in a lot of ways that young/new players don't understand

Durtainum brackets
increases total hull by 10. If you get 5 of these per day x 365 you will have additional 18250 hull in a year

Xcharge Cells
increases total shield by 5 if you get 5 of these per day x 365 you will have an additional 9125 shields in a year

Android Helmsmen
they add 3 helmsmen and if you get 5 of these per day x 365 you will have an additional defense of 5475 in a year

Android Scientist
they add 4 scientist and if you get 5 of these per day x 365 you will have an additional 7300 research in a year

Shipbots
they add 2 decks i'm sure after a year they will be sitting in your cargo bay. I know coz i have an army of these ship bots waiting in my cargo space waiting for the new ship modules to be added in the game

Rescued Prisoners
These are my favorite each one of these can add 6 engineers or 6 tactical officers in your ship if you get 5 of these per day x 365 you will have additional crew amounting to 10950 crewmembers

Mass storage adds 60 cargo space and Tesseract Container add 10 cargo space. (i cant even imaging how much cargo space you want but i have more than enough, to put 5 sets of ship modules in my cargo space. Aidonium takes up a lot of space so you really cant get enough cargo space)

While research is really nice to have. I suggest to all players that you should put some attention on your artifact production. In the long run you will need lots of artifacts and you can never have enough of them. I have read a lot of people complaining that they don't have enough artifacts to draw. I suggest to those people to make sure their planet capacity for artifacts fill up in 8 hours.. if you can do that then for sure you will have enough artifacts for your ship to grow ever so slowly but after a year your ship will be a strong one.

Hope this helps and explain why our ships can never be identical. thanks to our randomized artifact draws.

My bit on this:

Research is great but maxing your per hour at about 10k is all you will likely ever need (though more will kind of crop up).

Minerals are the 2nd highest you will need. Just to pay for all the stuff you gained. This should be higher then research at some point just tp stay around.

The highest is of course as remic said, artifacts. Free upgrades for your ship ect... It is worth maxing as much as you can.

so what your saying is when you get to 10k research an hour stop

thank you Remric, this is what I tell EVERYONE that complains about not having enough research, only I don't go into such a lengthy point, but this is the perfect explenation

I stppped getting research planets when I has 12k per hpur but my research per hour has increased by leaps and bounds from the android scientist I get from artifacts. Now I have more than 22k

I agree with everything you say but within reason. You are at the end of your research, you've maxed out the CT-Lab. Right now, you are just waiting for more research. The rest of us are actively researching. I have over 10k rp/hour and still have 90 days worth of research left to do, not including the CT-Lab.

While not as efficient, it is much easier to get a colossal research planet, maxed out with research arties and use the research contract to turn it directly into credits. You can consider this 20% more valuable than the minerals you get since you don't get taxed on it. (I've never done the calculation to know how much you get per MP vs RP.)

I agree to a certain extent.

But, it changes with your circumstances. I've recently colonized research planets trying to keep all my resources around the 8 hour cap. Now it's at 31k an hour. Mostly I use the research now to convert to credits.

at rank 306 im averaging around 30-40K per mineral point after tariff to mining is better for money but it ends up hitting the cap pretty quickly so research still holds decent money in it

Your missing the point. While research is great and I do love my 24k per hour research, thanks to 8k scientist (from artifacts) everything we get from research will cost credits to build and has an upkeep.

Artifacts are small powerups that build up over time and does not require upkeep. Which makes them awesome

lucky i learned this early have nearly 7000 ap an hour now

so basically what your saying is when you hit 10 research an hour stop colonizing research planets

?? but... we START with 10/hr... 12/hr if you're vygoid

whoops
i mean 10 thousand

SHHH if they don't get this all the artifacts are for me

no no no.. all of your arties are belong to me

Time and again i hear this story ...

You do research? ... scumbucket!

Everyone gets shouted at if they do research, however i think its easy to forget a lot of the people being told arti's are the only way forward really DO need the research.

Whats the point of being level 300 with the ship build of a rank 20 who will simply get pawned on the battlefield, unable to protect against hacks and never be able to competently fight any NPCs that get more difficult as the ranks climb since their ship is full of modules a quarter of the power for three times the space size than their level counterparts.

I admit looking back, as a rank 196, i can too quickly dismiss people struggling with basic advances pre rank 100's, even though it was only a couple months ago i was there myself, and probably rank 300+ i may get more distant from those memories as i believe some others have.

Dont get me wrong, the concept of artis' are sound, though pre-rank-60 i could never have a good enough income to get a shot of a 4000+ arti without waiting a day or so per turn so really focusing on arti's there was futile. Similarly, learning in research the enhanced buildings enhanced all my planets outputs so hard i can remember thinking, "wow, i got 51p/h out of that planet", and after upgrade mods its much nearer 150p/h! Ignoring research could never got me those mods, especially since my tiers are climbing to a quarter to half a million research each time.

But as time goes on research should calm down and other things like artis should rise, it should be steady and subtle in its change. Racing full speed to research finish is not the goal, getting so far ahead you can slow and still make decent progress to the finish is much better. Is that research gonna take 10 days, you can slow down to 2 weeks then cant you, its not that far different and youd gain more arits (or even mining) in that time.

Research isnt bad. Its damn near necessary, its just a matter of knowing when to thrash it, and when to phase arti's into the picture. Aim for the best of both worlds.

Research is important on at the beginning levels cuase the research points needed for certain technologies are scaled, as for artifacts, the prices for the artifacts remain the same at whatever rank while research gradually increases.

ALL OF YOUR ARTIS ARE BELONG TO US!

sorry, couldn't resist...