Research Tips

Many heads are better than one

(Note: the following is only a half guess at this point in time)

Like manufacturing, each project has a specific amount of research hours needed for completion. Unfortunately, research hours are not as easy to ascertain as manufacturing hours.

Each scientist allocated to a project is able to put in one research hour towards the completion of the project. Then for every hour of research time, each scientist contributes one hour towards research.

Once all the research hours are put in, the project will be declared a success at the end of the hour. (Or was it day?)

As research topics require many hours for completion, it is best to have large teams of scientists concentrate their efforts on one project at a time.

Start your projects

New projects appear on the new research schedule whenever their prerequisites are met. For most alien artefacts, this is merely to have a physical sample of the artefact in storage.

A quartermaster may occasionally sell off the last remaining artefect by accident before the science team can extract enough data from the artefact to begin the reverse engineering process.

In order to minimise the damage and prevent sending the assault team on a suicide mission to retrieve another artefact sample, scientists are able to extract all necessary data from any alien artefact at the commencement of every project. Therefore, it is advised that projects should always be started as soon as possible. Science personnel need not be assigned to the project for the data extraction and should continue to focus on topics of a higher priority.

Selective Alien Abduction

(Or how to keep containment lean and mean)

About the only few tips I have are these:

Your alien containment is restricted to TYPES of aliens, not total numbers, AFAIK. Since there are only a limited number of types of aliens, you 1 alien containment in each of 3 bases is more than enough for all needs.

Some aliens do not reappear if researchd. Ie the X-com command says "Well, we've got enough of those, let's shoot them and sell the bodies"

In the case of live aliens, you might NOT want to start and not complete research projects, for the above reason.

Build a dummy alien containment and send everything you don't want there. EVERYTHING. (suggest you only do things like this AFTER you've finished researching Cydonia or Bust)

Bring an autocannon with explosive ammo on every mission. Since you can check an alien's type by just standing on him and picking him up, you can just toss unwanted samples into a corner and get quick and easy kills.

Research - the smart way, not the hard way

(Discussion of the pros and cons of scientist by numbers (x50s))