In a way, it already does:

1. Multiple levels of the same research at the same speed and with similar costs speeds up research total
2. Not having more bases speed up research removes the exponential advantage given to higher-ranked players wherein they can crush you with both strength of numbers and elite technology
3. Bases = research speed would also prevent a smaller, more defensive player (lower log slots) from researching even more then it does now, forcing him to not only research techs lower on the tree but sacrifice economic structures for research, something that has only the alternative of..sacrificing economy for ships (though higher supply)
4. You can at the moment press massive advantages in research - the hull and shields upgrades are extremely useful, and you can get up to 21 beam damage for Illuminators following that tech tree.
5. The Advent have a level 1 culture ability that allows them to research 33% faster.

Bonus research centers give you bonus redundancy when a marauding resource-denial fleet comes stomping through and specifically targeting your research bases, which frankly is a tactic I don’t see nearly enough. It doesn’t take much of a fleet to go into an empire’s rear lines and play merry havoc in hit-and-run on their facilities, and most of the mid-rank players won’t twig to what you’re doing until their technological or economic development is stunted, hopefully enough to give you a resource edge to recoup the early investment in a marauder fleet.

Besides, elite technocracies don’t get anywhere without enough resources to feed the grinding wheels of their material-hungry processes. Put some early civ research into resource extraction and you can focus less on the economic aspect and more on research exploration and synergistic trees. An army moves on it’s belly and an empire runs on it’s resources.

(Incidently, if you’re building trade ports to get money to buy resources to purchase research, you’re TEC. That’s almost a whole aspect of the race’s strategy, to use economic means to leverage the other branches, just as the Advent use civilization/logistics-enhancing means and Vasari use map-control to do so. Research is simply a means to an end in accomplishing the domination of areas. In my opinion, the group profiting most from a technological focus is often the Vasari since so much of their leverage from heavy fleets split multiple ways depends on a steady flow of resources, which they can only really get through the Nanotechnology tree.)

Mechanically, I suspect that the reason additional research bases don’t enhance research speed is because it’s an RT game; juggling timers going off at short intervals would switch up the pace too significantly between strategic style choices and make it less ballanced. If a tech-rush strategy pushed the tick-pace up (where “ticks” are the decision-execution quanta of command entry, etc) then a research-heavy strategy would almost always beat out other strategies as they’d be the optimum rhythm. The major limiting factor would then shift almost wholly to resource-acquisition to fuel research rather than being roughly balanced with expanding fleets.

I don't really care about it being realistic though.



To me all goals in a 4x simply exist to make the research system have a purpose. It's not really a 4x unless it can be played with this sort of outlook.