Difficulty setting to scale science costs/alter mid-game tedium

[Frightning]

~snip~

Keep in mind, there are all of about a dozen techs that only take R science, but something like 40+ that take R+G and most of the R only are really cheap (10 packs or 20 or 30). You're meant to spend far more timing researching all those R+G (or at least most of them) before you get into R+G+(M or B), so that's lots of time for you to expand your infrastructure to prepare for it. Similarly, going from there to P and H science is also a major set up (less on the complexity of the setup itself and more so building up all supporting infrastructure for the ingredients for the new packs). Construction robotics is there to help once you get R+G+B up a running for a bit so you can start using blueprints to expand underlying infrastructure to support the new demands. B science is meant to be a big step up from R+G (M is kinda as well, but it's also less mandatory depending on map settings and not as complex as B). B science marks the transition from early game to mid game, it's not a small step. Even the step up in resource cost from R to G is nontrivial; +50% copper and +175% iron comparatively (also it is slightly slower at 6s instead of the 5s for R).

Red and green are super cheap. Something like five furnaces and five drills can keep three red and three green machines (in blue assemblers) running constantly, talking 2-3 seconds per science unit. It's not a lot, and is easy to scale. Then for blue to hit one bottle per six seconds (more like eight seconds with .75 crafting speed) requires like 20 furnaces and drills, many more times the machines and logistic paths, and all the oil. Space is needed and on enemy heavy games you have jack shit for options before blue (can't even reduce pollution that much before being a bit into red/green and have red chip machines going, or batteries for accumulators and a ton of solar panels - which means space). It's more than a "big step". You were right red takes five seconds, thought it took six. Using blueprints in excess of what's immediately convenient feels like cheating. Press the button, hook up transport belts, wait to win. No thanks.

Military science cost was cut so so much. I'm really glad it was. Absolutely drained the existing infrastructure I had if I wanted to produce it at a decent pace, in .16.

This is not true at all. You have access to plenty enough weaponry and armor to go clear out any nests near enough to cause serious problems. (nearby nests should consist of only small worms and spawners which initially only spawn small biters, so as long as your weaponry and armor can handle that you're fine). At R+G alone, you have access to Modular armor (but no equipment for it, it's still a little better than Heavy armor though, but Heavy armor is R only and much cheaper/easier to make so even if it's just Heavy armor that's fine), SMG and Shotgun, Piercing magazines for SMG (and Gun turrets), +20% to damage and shooting speed for bullets, Grenades (don't underestimate these, you can throw em at a rate of 2/s while shooting with your gun and they do AoE damage in a large radius), Walls for protecting the Gun turrets (which are amazing v. small biters because physical armor of Walls negating much of their damage). R+G science eventually gives tier 1 modules, Eff1 modules are amazing pollution reducers, solar+accumulator is an option to further leverage that energy (and pollution) reduction depending on space available. Steel furnaces are twice as energy efficient as Stone furnaces (so half Coal used=half as much needs to be mined for fueling smeltery).

That's all without even making Military science, add military science to the mix and it's way better, now your Modular armor has tier 1 equipment for it (notably shields and infrastructure to power them for a good while; batteries+PSPs). Flamethrower, Rocket launcher are now options, which solves issue of biter armor and being able to attack nests full of worms (even medium and big worms). Laser and Flamethrower turrets are also now available, which give much sturdier and longer range static defense/fire support options. Land mines are amazing and very under appreciated (their cheap AF and do tons of damage in a sizable area). Defender capsules are also an option (not sure how good they are nowadays).

[movax20h]

I did finish my first full playthrough few days ago, and granted I did overbuild some stuff in the start (was watching too many speedruns, which tough me few tricks), especially number of labs and space for future labs, as well my initial smelting setup and space for expansion was rather large, that in the mid game a lot of research was ridiculously fast (like 60 seconds). And some other stuff at the kind of same level in the technology tree was way slower. Unfortunately I do not remember which research was that, but it happened so many time in my mid game, that I did notice, and it was weird, as I expected the cost to be increasing rather steadily, and not be getting worse. The time should be getting up too, but that should encourage to build more labs to parallelize and keep the time reasonably constant. The actual cost maybe was reasonable in the game balance, but the speed at which I did finish this mid game research was just laughable, and removed any seriousness out of it.