TL;DR
Soft-capping research speed: The more science labs are working at the same time, the less each lab contributes to research.What ?
Currently research can be parallelized with no efficiency loss: build 10 labs, tech will be researched 10 times faster than with 1 lab.Also, no matter how many labs you have, research will cost exactly the same in number of flasks. More labs means faster research and that's it.
The idea would be to implement a diminishing return on lab efficiency when more than 1 lab is actively researching.
Of course, each additional lab would still have a positive marginal contribution to research, but not 100%.
A good function could be efficiency depending on the square root of number of labs (each additional lab is contributing less and less, but there's no theoretical cap to research speed).
Example :
1 lab working alone would consume 1 flask/second and contribute 1 flask/second to the research
2 labs working in parallel would consume 2 flasks/second (1 each) but contribute only 1.4 flask/second to the research
3 labs working in parallel would consume 3 flasks/second (1 each) but contribute only 1.7 flask/second to the research
4 labs working in parallel would consume 4 flasks/second (1 each) but contribute only 2 flask/second to the research
Etc.
In other words, the trade-off for increased research speed would be spending ("wasting") research flasks.
This could either be default vanilla behavior, or an option at game start.
Why ?
Past the very early game, adding new labs to consume more flasks in parallel is cheap and easy.The consequence is that reseach speed per flask doesn't matter much: you can research almost as fast as you want by adding more labs to research in parallel.
The real bottleneck, what really matters to determine research speed, is how fast your factory can produce the required flasks. You just need to install enough labs to eat your flasks faster than they are produced and you've reached your maximum research speed.
TL;DR: Research speed is essentially determined by how fast you can manufacture flasks.
This creates an balancing issue: it's difficult to calibrate research speed to player skill AND in multiplayer games.
At any point in a game (early, mid or late), skilled players are able to churn out several times more flasks per second than a new player.
In multiplayer it's even more obvious : X players could theoretically produce X times as many flasks by working each on their side; in practice they'll likely still produce flasks several times faster than a single player at the same technology level.
The research cost (which is essentially dictating the pace of the game = how fast you'll have access to new machines and options) is hard to properly calibrate for all games :
- Either it's too high and it's frustrating to wait a long time for new research to unlock
- Or it's too low and you discover things faster than you can use them
The suggestion would alleviate the difficulty to calibrate research cost and help setting a relatively consistent global game pace:
If you're good or playing multi, increasing flask manufacturing speed will still make research advance faster, but not linearly.
In other words, the general speed at which you progress through a game would scale with how well you're doing.
