Let's start by understanding the basic mechanics of research. You get research points from 3 main sources:
1. Nations you control
2. Orgs your councilors control
3. Space labs

1. Research in countries scales with the following

• Population - Research scales with population^1.1. Big pop nations are better
  
• GDP per Capita - Linear scaling, but with a floor at 15k and a cap at 48.75k. So you will not get more research for increasing GDP beyond that point
  
• Education - Scales with education^2, so higher levels of education contribute more to research than lower ones.
  
• Democracy - scales with democracy^0.2, with a floor of democracy=0.1. The implication of this is that even at 1 government research is multiplied by 1, while at max democracy (10) there's only a 1.58 multiplier. Democracy is probably less significant than you thought it is
  
• Unrest - Linear scaling, from a 80% reduction at 10 unrest to full research at 2 unrest
  
• Cohesion - Linear scaling, from a 40% reduction at either 10 or 0 at full research at 5 cohesion.

Note that the knowledge priority boosts only education, government and cohesion. Other priorities can also help your research. Economy increases your GDP, military lowers unrest (but only slightly), welfare also lowers and helps cohesion indirectly. Unity is great for fixing unrest and cohesion problems, at least on the short term. When your cohesion is very low, prioritize unity over knowledge. Spoils is the absolute worst for research output, lowering many of those quantities. Don't run spoils in your research focused countries. I recommend choosing a huge population country as your research hub and building it up. Good options are EU, China and India, but the latter two will take some time to really come together.

2. Early on, orgs can have a large effect on your research, so try to get some that give research points. Later however, this source of research becomes insignificant.

3. There's a whole bunch of modules that grant research points and bonuses to research. These are very useful later in the game, but the only tier 1 models that are really worth the while are the xenology labs, which grant 10% bonus to xenoscience research. The others grant a measly 3% and only a few research points so feel free to not build them if you don't think they're important for your gameplan. We'll talk about the tier 2 research modules later in this guide.

4. Okay, I lied, there's another important source of research income, one that's hidden away in the tooltips and not explained properly in the tutorial. If you put research priority into multiple techs and projects, you get bonus research. You only need to put one priority point to get the boost. It's quite a significant boost as well. Therefore I recommend that you put at least one point in any project/tech that matters to you, unless there's a project/tech that you really want to finish quickly.

Now let's talk about technologies. Technologies are global, everybody puts points towards them and they benefit everybody, so not every tech will give you an advantage. However, if you put more research into them you will have a better chance at obtaining the associated projects quickly. You also get to pick the next tech if you invested the maximum. Also, if you're anti-alien, you have an interest in improving tech so that you can match the alien technology. However, if you're playing as the servants, it can be an interesting strategy to only rarely invest in technology just to keep everybody behind the aliens. Alternatively with enough research you can try to lock out key technologies by putting more research than anybody else into all techs.


Most techs also don't give any advantages by themselves. To get the benefits, you want to be looking at the associated projects. Since it's very hard to see the project details in the interface, and in some like ship modules you get almost no information before you actually unlock the project, make sure you read the rest of the guide to understand what to prioritize

Early game priorities fall into 3 categories:

1. Supporting your earth-based operations
   
2. Unlocking techs necessary for space mining
   
3. Faction Projects

1. There's really only one very important project in this category - Clandestine Operations, which allows you to recruit your fifth councilor. A fifth councilor just allows you to do more of everything. This is probably your most urgent early game priority. You get it from the We Are Not Alone tech. Make sure you prioritize that. Another tech to notice here is Deep Space Skywatch. When you research it, the Academy will suffer a crackdown in half of their control points. Try to time it so that you can take the most advantage out of it.

2. Space mining is your first space priority. Building stuff in space is much, much cheaper than with boost. Don't bother using your boost on anything else until you get at least a bit of mining online. This will require you to research Mission to the Moon, Outpost Habs, and Space Mining and Refining. These will unlock mining on the moon, outposts (which is where you put your mines), and the mining module, respectively. Make sure you actually research the projects for these modules. After you get these you'll be able to mine the moon. However, the moon will not have all the resources you need, so next you should research Mission to Mars and Fission in Space. Fission in space unlocks the fission pile, which will make it much easier to get the necessary energy on Mars. When you're getting the "Mission to x" techs, make sure you have some boost ready to send a probe immediately and then snatch the most lucrative mining spots before your competitors can. Sometimes you will want to wait until you actually have enough boost. You also want to unlock projects that reduce boost costs for launching beyond earth. Each of these has a big effect of boost costs. The projects are Solid Fuel Space Rockets -> Liquid Fuel Space Rockets -> Cryogenic Fuel Space Rockets -> Advanced Chemical Rockets. You need to research them in order, and keep in mind it takes times for subsequent projects to pop up, so prioritize them early. The first three don't require any techs but the last one requires the Advanced Chemical Rocketry tech. Advanced Chemical Rocketry also unlocks some other projects that increase boost so make sure to unlock it. Another two useful techs at this point for improving your boost economy are Solid Core Fission Systems, which gives Nuclear Freighters that greatly reduces boost costs (it's also a pretty useful tech later), and Next-Generation Aerospace, which has a couple of projects that make the boost priority more efficient. These techs are more expensive though, so if you manage to jumpstart your space economy before researching them they become less important.

3. Faction projects are those that are not related to a certain tech and usually are tied with some objective. Make sure to complete those. They will also be there later, but I will not mention them anymore in this guide, as you'll pretty much always want them and they depend on which faction you are playing.

There's also a whole bunch of shipbuilding techs in the early game tree. Don't bother with those yet. It's going to be years before you will need to develop your first ship.

I've underlined the important early game techs and their prerequisites in the tech tree below.

For the purposes on this guide, the mid game starts after you have some basic space mining industry going on, you've consolidated power in some countries and the year is about 2024 or 2025. In this part of the game, you have 4 broad tech priorities:

1. Get tier 2 space holdings
   
2. Support Operations on earth
   
3. Faction Projects
   
4. Build a few ships to take down an alien ship

You can pursue most of these goals simultaneously but the last one should probably come later in this phase of the game.

1. Tier 2 space holdings can really help boost your progress, especially your technological progress. You start by unlocking the bases with the Orbitals and Space Habitat techs. These will also unlock projects that give you the tier 2 energy generation modules. Useful tier 2 modules are

• Skunkworks, unlocked by Advanced Neural Networks. These are incredibly important as they accelerate all of your projects, and having just one of them opens a new project slot. Important note: Do not build skunkworks in earth orbit. Having them there allows enemy councilors to target them to sabotage or steal your technology. I got myself in a situation where I couldn't make any technological progress because other factions were continuously sabotaging me.
  
• Research campuses, unlocked by Space Research. They give a very big tech boost.
  
• The various research centers, unlocked by Directed Space Research. Much stronger than the tier 1 versions.
  
• Nanofactories, for accelerated building. They also make you some money, but at this point you'll probably still have to get most of your funds from earth. I wouldn't recommend building those en masse.
  
• Shipyards, for building ships quicker.
  
• Operations Center allows you to get more mission control. A common play is to spam these around mercury where getting the energy you need is easier. However, I would recommend against going too heavily into those, as both alien hate and cash are going to limit your space expansion at this point in the game, so I that at the time you unlock them you still mostly want to be building mission control on earth.
  
• Layered Defense Array. If you get too much hate from the aliens from doing stuff against them (check your alien threat meter) these will help you defend your stations.

To support your budding space industry, you'll also want Mission to the Asteroids, which gives you many more places to mine resources, and Mission to the Inner Planets, where you can build much more efficient bases due to the large amount of energy per solar collector.

Once your space economy is nice and developed, you should start worrying about the way that mission control affects the alien threat meter. Alien hate is the quantity that informs this meter, and if it goes above 50 the aliens start retaliating. Mission control forms the rest value for this meter. At normal difficulty, it's multiplied by x0.4 to form the rest value, which means that the highest you can possibly go without the aliens being constantly at war with you is 119. You probably want to go lower to be safe at this point. However, there are some incredibly useful projects which can increase this soft cap by about 25% each. Strategic Deception is the first one and comes from Arrival Security and Hydra Interrogation . Together with the Quantum Encryption tech, it unlocks Maskirovka, which gives another 25%. The last one is Operational Misdirection which lies deep in the tech tree, unlocked by Fleet Logistics.



2. Ships are complicated. There are so many different modules it's very easy to lose track. Let's start with the basics. Don't research ship parts you don't need. There are plenty of underpowered, obsolete, or otherwise unnecessary modules you will encounter. Only research those that give you something actually better. Let's talk about the ship components you'll need to research.

• Drive. Most early game drives are just too bad to reliably move your ships around. The best drive available at this point is clearly the Grid Drive, unlocked by high energy electrostatic propulsion.
  
• Battery. From my experience, batteries are not very important. Ships usually don't use up all their battery, and batteries are light anyways. However if you find yourself with a nice battery project, go ahead.
  
• Radiator. Not the most important component, and the starting ones will do for a while. Just get better ones as they come.
  
• Power Plant. The Solid Core Fission Reactor will carry you a long way. There's 6 iterations, which will unlock after you've researched the previous version. You get them from Solid Core Fission Systems
  
• Armor. Advanced Carbon Manipulation will unlock the composite Armor, then Carbon Nanotubes will unlock the Nanotube armor. Both are big improvements over previous armor, so you don't need to bother with much else.
  
• Weapons. There's three categories of weapons, and you could write a whole guide on them. However, the short version is that if you want to fight aliens, early on you want either missiles or lasers. Aliens are too fast for the starter magnetic weapons. Their ships dodge them easily. Later on missiles become quite useless as alien point defense easily picks them off, while magnetic weapons become useful again. So for now just go ahead and pick a weapon type. After you research it, you'll get a ton of different projects opened. Prioritize the small weapons that only take 1 nose/hull points. Even for bigger ships you can just put several smaller weapons with barely any penalty. Make sure you also unlock some kind of point defense module, such as the point defense laser or the autocannon, as these are important to defend your ships by shooting down alien projectiles.
  
• Utility Modules. The most important ones are the lithium heat sink (Advanced Heat Management Concepts), which will allow your ships to be lighter and the magazine (Unlocked easily with starter techs), but only if you're going for missiles. Note that the ECM module is only useful for fighting humans until a later project makes it work against aliens.

3. Most of the social science and operations-related technologies are actually quite weak and give you things like 5% for a specific investment point category. However there are three paths of good technologies here. Some of these are expensive so it might take you a while to get them. First, Cybernetics technologies give you projects that give you the ability to add 1 for each level to most of your councilor states. Cybernetics gives the first tier, Applied Artificial Intelligence gives the second tier, and mind and machine gives the third tier.

Then there's Unity Movements and Great Nations which will allow you to create various mega-countries. Note that the projects these technologies grant you are quite expensive.

Finally there's independence movements which unlocks Global Command Structure which gives 25 more control points.

4. At this point I should highlight that in addition to advancing the story and giving you some bonuses, faction projects unlock an array of projects that makes it harder for Aliens to disrupt you. You'll probably want to research some of those.

Once again, I've underlined important techs on the tech tree. Circled techs are weapon techs, you need to research at least one of these but there's no reason to research everything.

Please mind that this section is still work in progress

At this stage of the game, there are 3 broad priorities

1. Self-sufficient space infrastructure, including Tier 3 habs and modules
   
2. Building capable defense fleets
   
3. Taking the fight to the aliens (for Resistance, Humanity First, Initiative, Academy)

There's not much good earth operations techs at this point in the game, but you can still continue taking some if you think it's useful or haven't gotten some from the last section.

As opposed to the other sections, you'll be looking to achieve these goals one by one rather than simultaneously. The exact order can vary though. You might have attracted lots of alien hate, in which case you have to start with defense fleets. Otherwise tier 3 stuff will probably be the first one. Taking the fight to the aliens should be the very last one.

1. The key tech here is Ring Habs. It will unlock most tier 3 modules after you finish the ring core project. Tier 3 modules are not only simply more powerful, they will finally allow your space economy to be self-sufficient. By now your space economy is probably bottlenecked either by money or by The cap for alien hatred (Should be around 120 on normal difficulty, 180 after completing both relevant projects). Tier 3 habs allow you to get past both. Nanofacturing complexes make a whopping 250 money per month, much more than the previous iterations. However they consume quite a lot of both metals and rare metals. Complement them with Space Hotels or Geriatrics facilities to achieve the income you need. Agriculture complexes are way better than farms and can keep your water and volatiles income decent. Battlestations allow you to defend against all but the alien mega-fleets (You should at least be able to do some damage to these if they attack, just don't autoresolve). You will probably also need to expand your mining operations to keep up with growing demand at this need. You'll need the Colony Habs tech as well as Mission to Jupiter and perhaps mission to Saturn or outer planets. Note: Don't send probes and habs from earth to Jupiter and Saturn. It will take years. Use colony ships to deploy platforms and outposts instead. You can prospect a planet quickly either by building a space dock on an adjacent platform or by putting the mobile space science lab on your ships.

There's two more key technologies to mention here. First there's Fusion in space, which unlocks fusion modules which give twice the electricity as the fission energy modules, making them much more efficient. That's as far as you should be going in the fusion tech path for reasons I will shortly explain.

Second is antimatter mass production, which unlocks the supercollider module. In the very late game, Supercolliders are not only good for powering up antimatter drives, but with the right techs they can also provide the cash that you will need. If you have all the projects that allow you to sell resources for more cash, you can sell antimatter for 45k a unit, meaning every supercollider yields 4.5k per month. The techs that unlock those projects are Space commerce, Administration Algorithms and Integrated Space-earth economy, one each. Also note that the tooltip on those projects is misleading, they allow you to sell for an additional 10% of the buying price, this can be like twice as much. Even without those techs antimatter sells for a lot. The same tech also opens up some of the best late game drives.

2. For capable defense fleets, there are 3 key components you'll need.
- Good armor. Use Adamantine Armor from diamondoids, anything further requires lots of exotics, too much.
- Good weapons. Tier 2 weapons should be sufficient at this point. Either green lasers (preferably arc lasers) or coilguns.
- A mid-game drive. My recommendation at this stage of the game is the minimag orion drive. You get it from Fission Pulse Drives and Z-Pinch Techniques. You can later upgrade to the advanced version of this drive by getting the Magnetic Nozzles tech.

Deploy fleets made from these in addition to defense modules to help defend your stations against alien attacks.


3. To take the fight to the aliens, you need really good ships. The most important component you need is a good drive, otherwise chasing aliens or going around the solar system is just not possible. However, most really good drives are gated behind tons and tons of very expensive fusion research. The most advanced fusion drives also have some very bad heat waste issues. Instead I recommend two drives:

a. The Neutron Flux Torch is one of the best in the game and only requires you to research Advanced Fission Systems. It's a bit complicated to get though. After the tech, you'll need to research Salt Water Fission Reactor I. This will unlock Neutron Flux Drive (not the one you want) and Salt Water Fission Reactor II. Salt Water Reactor II also has another requirement, which annoyingly does not show up on the tech tree. I'm not sure what it is, but it changed from red to white (possible to unlock) for me after I researched Gas Core Fission Reactor II and Terawatt Gas Core Reactor I, so it's most likely either of those. After you research Salt Water Reactor II and the drive, Neutron Flux Torch can unlock. The important thing here is to prepare for a bit of a wait. These projects can take a while to unlock so be prepared.

b. The weakness of the Neutron Flux drive is that it costs a lot of rare metals to produce and a lot of fissiles to power up, both of which are scare. In my opinion, the best alternative is the Advanced Antimatter Plasma Drive. It's slightly less powerful but is less costly and requires less additional mass. To get it you first need to research Antimatter Propulsion. you then complete the Antimatter Plasma Power Plant I-III, Antimatter Plasma Drive and Antimatter Pulsed Plasma Drive. Note that there are a bunch of more technologies to unlock on the way, but if you unlocked the technology prerequisites for the Neutron Flux Torch at this point you should be fine.

You'll also need some very good weapons. I only really have experience with lasers but I've heard coilguns can also be effective. For lasers you'll really want to get Phasers, it's more important than UV lasers. Note that antimatter nukes and plasma weapons are both slightly underpowered right now. Applied Artificial Intelligence is also nice here as is unlocks projects that increase your damage output by 10%.

With enough space resources from priority 1 and good enough battleship tech, you should now be able to take on the alien megafleets and start launching towards their stations. I recommend using the skirmish mode at this point so you can see that your designs and tactics actually work before committing to them as heavily as you will need to. There's two tips I want to mention at this stage. One is that you can destroy alien colonies by simply landing your ships in them and using destroy hab. I don't know if it's a bug but you can destroy a colony with a single ship this way without taking any damage. The second tip is to send some colony ships together or after your main fleets when you're going far away. This way you can refuel and repair at your destination.

Your feedback is welcome! Please tell me what techs were important to you and I might add them to the guide. I'll conclude by repeating the most important tips in the guide

1. Research in a country is made from more than just the knowledge priority. Sometimes the best thing for your research can be investing in unity, for example.
   
2. If you're interested in a tech, put at least one point into it to take advantage of the distribution bonus. Similarly, allocate at least one point to every project, in most situations
   
3. Don't research obsolete and simply bad ship modules. Get used to the fact that your project research options will fill up with random stuff.
   
4. Don't build Skunkworks around Earth, they make it so enemy councilors can steal effectively