Optimisation rather than research?

[mrudat]

I never really got the point of 'research' in strategy games; the majority of the stuff you're researching (at least in a high-tech campaign) is stuff that you should be able to look up in an encyclopedia to find out how to do, rather than nominally figuring out how to do this entirely new ground-breaking thing that has never been done by anyone ever before. It gets even more hard to swallow when you leave your first base (where you've completed all available research) and you start base 2, only to forget how to build all of those things that you built last time.

I think it might be nifty to have things so that you can do a slow bodged version of (most) of everything right from the start, and instead of performing research into how to build (say) a fractionating column, you instead research how to get the best yield out of the local raw materials (because, nominally, they're different in composition that the last place you were at). This is more-or-less what productivity equates to; in theory you're not actually getting more stuff from nothing, you've just figured out how to use the existing stuff more efficiently.

In terms of concrete implementation; clone all of the existing recipes 5-10 times; each cloned recipe is progressively worse than the previous, in terms of ratio of results to ingredients, going slower (like Omnimatter), or perhaps producing defects. The worst recipe of each set is unlocked at the beginning of the game. Each research is also duplicated, once for each level of each recipe, with the original research cost spread out across the multiple tiers of recipes. You'd have a tier-1 technology that remains the prerequisite for any dependent technology, and for each recipe 5-10 technologies that optimise the yield of that particular technology.