I'll agree that some of the mechanics for combat/Units don't make a lot of sense, partly because this is a game based on giant robot animes, and partly because my mechanics can be shitty at times. Still, that's what GR@W 2 is for, eh? And if you have any suggestions/ideas on how to improve things, I'd love to hear them.
If we're going to be making this scientifically accurate, we can't have mecha. Therefore we shouldn't worry too much about scientific accuracy. (Which was the point of bringing up that this was a mecha game.)
I am going to disagree about the correlation between land size and research capacity though. Europe is only a small part of the world, but they (more or less) managed to surpass everyone technologically for a couple centuries.
By sheer chance. Eurasia as a whole was always ahead, due to factors like axis direction, availability of domesticable species, and (believe it or no) size; the fact that Europe was ahead of Asia for a while had mainly due to (Warning! Generalizations ahead!) with the fact that the Asians conquered up to Europe before having their warlord die and so everyone had to go home to vote, then the Chinese emperors went on a conservative streak letting Europe leap ahead. Eurasia's size was one of the big factors in letting it get as massive as it did; no region of the New World optimal for advanced civilization was the size of even Europe, which meant they could support more people even if they had the same animals and such.
More importantly, while it doesn't matter much if we're contrasting between, say, Europe and the Midwest, it matters a lot if we're contrasting, say, North Korea and the entire democratic world. Or a handful of colonies totalling up to maybe a couple million, and the entire Earth of several billion. Little places simply can't support as many researchers, as many labs, as many particle accelerators, etc.
Besides, I'd rather not have research related to empire size due to balance issues. If the largest empire had the most research, then it's obviously unstoppable since it can produce large numbers of Units that are several levels above everyone else. It's not terribly fun when it happens, trust me.
True enough. Which is why I brought it up in "realism issues" and not "balance issues".