Research Technical Details

Research Time

The following is a list of all research topics in the game. Values taken from RESEARCH.DAT.

Man Days	One Lab	Research Project
400	8	Alien Alloys
180	3.6	Alien Corpses (each -- 11 different types)
150	3	Alien Entertainment
150	3	Alien Food
200	4	Alien Grenade
300	6	Alien Origins
150	3	Alien Reproduction*
150	3	Alien Surgery
300	6	Blaster Bomb
900	18	Blaster Launcher
600	12	Cydonia or Bust
450	9	Elerium-115
150	3	Examination Room
330	6.6	Flying Suit
800	16	Fusion Defenses
880	17.6	Fusion Missile (Fusion Ball & Launcher)
930	18.6	Grav Shield
460	9.2	Heavy Laser
800	16	Heavy Plasma
400	8	Heavy Plasma Clip
670	13.4	Hyper-Wave Decoder
420	8.4	Laser Cannon
510	10.2	Laser Defenses
100	2	Laser Pistol
300	6	Laser Rifle
50	1	Laser Weapons
192	3.84	Live Aliens (except Terrorists and Sectoid Commander) (22 types)
190	3.8	Live Sectoid Commander (go figure)
170	3.4	Live Terrorists (4 types -- Reaper, Chryssalid, Silacoid, Celatid)
210	4.2	Medi-Kit
600	12	Mind Probe
360	7.2	Mind Shield
180	3.6	Motion Scanner
600	12	New Fighter Craft (Firestorm)
700	14	New Fighter-Transporter (Lightning)
180	3.6	Personal Armor
660	13.2	Plasma Beam
620	12.4	Plasma Defenses
600	12	Plasma Pistol
400	8	Plasma Pistol Clip
700	14	Plasma Rifle
400	8	Plasma Rifle Clip
205	4.1	Power Suit
500	10	Psi-Amp
420	8.4	Psi-Lab
550	11	Small Launcher
180	3.6	Stun Bomb
500	10	The Martian Solution
450	9	UFO Construction
450	9	UFO Navigation
450	9	UFO Power Source
900	18	Ultimate Craft (Avenger)

* Alien Reproduction is not ordinarily researchable unless you use an editor to add one your General Stores.

Research Time Notes

• One Lab is the number of Days divided by 50. This shows how quickly one lab full of 50 scientists needs to complete the Project, on average. Two labs full of scientists would need half this time on average, etc.
• This single check per day also means they will take a minimum of one day, except in special circumstances. Decimals are still shown for the One Lab column, however, so you can project to multiple labs and/or see where time is lost or gained by truncation (read on).
• The numbers shown in the tables are averages. In actuality, the time may differ by +- 50%. Laser Weapons may take anything from 25 to 75 man days, on average it's 50.
• Projects only progress and check completion at midnight, so what scientists are doing – whether traveling between bases, on different projects or sitting in the coffee room unassigned – during the entire rest of the day is irrelevant. All that matters is what (if any) projects they are on at midnight.
• Each midnight, the game subtracts the number of man days according to how many men you have assigned to that project; the project is done when the counter reaches zero. If a project will require 31 man days and you have 10 scientists assigned, it will take four days to complete. By then you have spent (10 Scientists * 4 days = 40 man days) and effectively wasted nine. On the last day, you could withdraw nine scientists from the project; or you could have started it with only eight to begin with and still have researched it in four days. However, as there is no way of knowing how much time a project will really need, it's inevitable that a few man days will be wasted on every project.
• The efficiency increases as the number of scientists on a project decreases. If you run several projects in parallel, you'll waste fewer man days overall. In the extreme case, you'd assign only one scientist on every project and would be sure that not a single man day will be lost; however, it would also take months or even years to get anything done. You decide.
• Actually, all that matters is the last day; so you could at first assign many scientists and, once you feel that the project approaches conclusion, remove most of them. But without cheating, there's no way of telling.

Research Progress

The Progress part of the current Research screen will give you an idea of how things are going, but you will have to know how to read the information it is giving you.

Unknown Progress

The first part of understanding the progress report is knowing why a project has an Unknown progress. This happens whenever a project has more than 2/3rds of its average research time left. Examples:

• Laser Weapons average 50 Man Days (MDs), so if you have 34 or more MDs left then it will be listed as Unknown
• Psi Amps average 500 MDs, so if you have 334 or more MDs left then it will be listed as Unknown

Clearly this indicates an immediate fact that can be helpful (especially if you want to do some cheating), that if you create a project and assign even just one scientist to it and don't get Unknown, then you just got a good roll for the time required (more accurately, in the top 16.7% of possible results, or 1 in 6 projects). Let's walk through an example:

• Say a project has an average time of 120 MDs. Thus, it's roll can actually be 60 to 180 MDs.
• If you get the best possible roll - 60 MDs - the project is at 50% relative to the average time of 120 MDs. 50% is greater than a third, so it will not be at Unknown.
• The break-even point for a 120-average-MDs project would be a roll of 80 MDs. At 80, the algorithm thinks, "ok, 80 more MDs are needed; 120-80=40 MDs are gone, which is one third of 120 MDs. So it's not Unknown status any more."
• This range of 60 to 80 MDs is only one-sixth of the possible rolls for a 120 day project (60 to 180 MDs). Thus, you have to get in the top sixth of rolls to not see Unknown.

Known Progress

Okay, so eventually your project gets out of Unknown status due to the industrious sweat of your scientists and the progress of time (or alternately a bit of reloading of saves). Now we get back an actual progress rating of Poor, Average, Good or Excellent, and we need to understand what they mean.

Actual Progress ratings are related again to the average project durations for the item being researched, but this time as we know it is related to the number of scientists on the project. So simply divide the number of assigned scientists by average project research time and convert to a percentage:

Scientists assigned / Average ManDays required * 100 = Progress Rating

Named Rating	Progress Rating
Excellent	26+
Good	14 to <26
Average	8 to <14
Poor	>0 to <8
None	0

Note the progress rating is equivalent to the percentage progress you would make if you happen to roll exactly average when starting a project, so an average Excellent project will be at most 4 days to complete (26%*4), but you have to factor in the random element - i.e., that you actually have a target of somewhere between 50% and 150%, so the range if you are just inside Excellent is 2-6 days, for example.

So to show against our previous examples, once they are not unknown:

• Laser Weapons have an average project time of 50, so 0 gives None, 1 to 3 gives Poor, 4 to 6 gives Average, 7 to 12 gives Good, and 13 or more gives Excellent
• Psi Amps have an average project time of 500, so 0 gives None, 1 to 39 gives Poor, 40 to 69 gives Average, 70 to 129 gives Good, and 130 or more gives Excellent

Note that the actual time left is not included in this calculation, so once it is out of unknown the progress seen on screen will only change if you change the number of scientists assigned.

We can also deduce the range of maximum times left from the ratings as well, although unknown and poor have too high a range to be meaningful really (although you can divide the values shown by the number of scientists you have assigned, and reduce it proportionality if you have a project shorter than Grav Shield).

Named Rating	Days Left
Excellent	1 to 3
Good	1 to 5
Average	1 to 9
Poor	1 to 620
Unknown	1 to 1395
None	Infinite

Notes: For Unknown 1395 is the worst roll on Grav Shield, and you might only have 1 man doing it, but on the other end for Laser Weapons you could have 34 Man Days left, but easily have that many scientists on it to complete it next midnight. For Poor it covers from a large range like Unknown, but you must have completed 2/3rds of it, so again for the highest average project time Grav Shield we get 930*(2/3), or 620. For long projects like Grav Shield you can be rated poor while having up to 74 scientists assigned due to their average time to complete being so high.

Of course really the only important thing here is that we are not seeing Unknown, at that point you know that you only have 2/3rds or less left, so at that point you can work it out more accurately just by: 66.7%/Progress Rating = Max Days left (round all fractions up). If you just started the project (or have never assigned anyone to it) you also know it is at least 50%, so 50%/Progress Rating = Min Days left at that point.

Total Research Time

The total time needed to research all technologies is 21,215 days, plus another 576 to research The Minimum Three, plus another 6,500 or so to add every alien species, ship type, and mission type entry to the UFOpaedia (about 28,300 days total).

This can be compared against the total time needed for 1 Scientist, 50 Scientists (1 lab), 100 (2 labs), and so on. Numbers were composed by taking the average of the integer-truncated min and max for each project, then summing these together for all projects:

Note: the following figures are based on an earlier (incomplete) list of research topics. The specific numbers are no longer correct, although the "efficiency" figures are likely to be similar.

          Scientists
              1      50    100    150    200    250    300    350    400    450    500
Days        20215   391    190    125     94     75     67     58     56     52     49
Months       663  12.82   6.23   4.10   3.08   2.46   2.20   1.89   1.84   1.69   1.61
Efficiency    --    +3%    +6%    +8%    +8%    +8%    +1%    +0%   -10%   -13%   -17%

"Months" are considered to be 30.5 days long.

Efficiency shows how much time is gained or lost versus a pure case with absolutely no integer truncation or 1-day minima (see Notes). As can be seen, it is maximal around 3-5 labs, then starts dropping and keeps dropping.

Note that going from 3 labs to 4 only saves you about a month -- which is about how long it takes to set up the lab! In practice, 2-3 labs are quite sufficient to acquire all alien technologies in a reasonable time frame.