Can you be more specific? I discovered a handful of military techs from the AI under one of my cities that I'm currently scared to talk to again (it's how I got Battledress w/o Walkers, and how I learned about Beam Guns w/o Laser Guns, even though unlike you I decided to go ahead and learn LG before diving into BG), and I didn't discover both Charged Gauss & Gas Weps until pretty late (Gas just this turn) so I could skip them.
Here's a question you might not want to answer, since I can't tell from my periodic spy reports: do you have all your councils active, or have you been doing Applied/Air research through your Mil council? I ask b/c while I'd never to do that myself, those aforementioned spy reports have been really confusing some turns, where I just couldn't figure out what your Mil council was studying unless it was doing something linear. If you are doing that, you may be losing more than you gain by concentrating your BP due to the penalties for concentrating BP. Alternately, I suppose you may have been pausing research to force specific discoveries before opening a new field, which is something I managed to avoid doing this game; that's probably also helped my progress.
The related question would be how much of your budget is going to Mil, and how Mil divides its discovery and research. I've been at around 15-20% to Mil all game, and ramped up to my current 30/70 split fairly quickly (I doubt it was ever below 40/60 after the first 10 turns, and it may have gone straight to 33/67 TBH).
O/w, I'd point out that I've pretty consistently had a fairly large Research Bonus even if it's not as obscene as yours; right now I have 65% for Econ/Applied/Air and 82% for Military (although TBH this might also apply to some Applied and all Air; IDK), and I'm fairly sure my BP production has dwarfed yours all game (the +40% BP and occasional Bureaucratic Push stratagems from Gov have certainly helped). You're catching up on Bureaucracy, but you put more emphasis on industry for a lot of the game. It's possible that higher gov't directly affects BP output or application w/o really talking about it; there are some subtle effects that aren't well documented like how Meritocracy impacts recruited leader Capability (though I wanna say Gov leans more towards impacting tax tolerance than BP output, but there's enough black box mechanics I'm not sure).
It probably also has helped that my starting (Cap IV) Military director's career is scientist. I made the mistake of putting a Cap III/Int 43 tank commander in charge of my Econ council on turn 4, and while she did more-or-less okay for a long time, she spend so much time improving her military skills I cracked 7 turns ago and switched her back to an OHQ so I could replace her with a Cap IV trader. The trader has already gone from 0 (okay, technically 16) Science to half what her predecessor had after 72 turns in that role. Her Invention is a lot worse than her predecessor's was, but I've only got 2 more Econ discoveries I can make, so it's not that big of a deal.
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Topic: Shadow Empire PBEM round 2: game on (Read 33348 times)