Slitherine

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1) Do you fire "personality" ?

The newbie guide from Timotheus seems to infer yes fire them - the ultimate guide to winning says no - stash them away. I cannot resolve the differences (or at least in two different guides I was reading if not those specifically)

In the situation I am / was playing with a Fleet Admiral for example that acquired the trait drunkard and had many negative aspects. I re-assigned him back to a small inactive type fleet - but would it have simply been better to fire him outright and hope the next spawned Admiral had overall characteristics ? Similarly with a "Leader" (Democracy). They do change randomly and periodically but I was saddled with one with a hefty (-10) in Colony Income at a point in time it was inconvenient to say the least.

So 'generally' fire them or not ?

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2) Do you 'lab up' your Space Ports or maximize the scientists into dedicated research labs on home world?

Again the newbie OCD guide from Timotheus suggests 5 labs each per space port 'starting' out. Other threads and guides say 'no labs' in space ports - it waters down research.

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Edit: oops, replied to wrong person. Sorry, Aeson!

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Later, I'll just have three large installations at the three largest bonus locations I can reasonably defend, so that I have the best possible buffs in energy, hitech and weapons.

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it's way easier to build a dedicated lab in the home orbit and use it to alter research focus with retrofits than it is multiple stations.

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There's also a chance to generate a new scientist each time you build a research base, so if you play races that don't get many scientists (I usually do) that's something to consider.

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ORIGINAL: Aeson

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Edit: oops, replied to wrong person. Sorry, Aeson!

There's no need to apologize; I'm pretty sure that the "Post Reply" button at the bottom of the page automatically makes the reply to the last person to post in the thread as of the time that you hit it anyways.

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Later, I'll just have three large installations at the three largest bonus locations I can reasonably defend, so that I have the best possible buffs in energy, hitech and weapons.

Note that when you have N scientist characters in the same location, their skill bonuses in a field stack as sum([scientist_n_bonus]/n, n=1:N) with the bonuses ordered from highest to lowest in the field. If your scientists have reasonably large bonuses in two or three fields rather than a large bonus in one field and at most small bonuses in the other two, or possibly if you have many scientists with moderate bonuses across all fields, it is possible that it will be better, or at least little worse, to stack all of your scientists in one location than to spread them out across the best research locations.

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it's way easier to build a dedicated lab in the home orbit and use it to alter research focus with retrofits than it is multiple stations.

Still doesn't need to be a [Field] Research Station; the home space port will do just as well. Retrofitting bills you for alterations, not for the total cost of building the station from scratch, there's not really any good reason to have a big space port anywhere but the homeworld in the early stages of the game so there's not really any reason to worry about retrofitting multiple stations in order to rebalance research priorities (again, not that I really see much reason to do so once you're at the stage of the game where having an interstellar empire really becomes practical), and building the home space port with labs or retrofitting them in after the basic space port skeleton is completed is slightly faster and probably slightly cheaper than building a separate research station.* Also somewhat safer, since the space port, as your homeworld's primary orbital installation, is probably larger, better armed, and better protected than any research station(s) you might build at the homeworld or elsewhere, especially if you don't manually place the research station on top of the spaceport and instead allow the game to place it in a somewhat more exposed position slightly away from the homeworld.

*There are several components of which you only need one per station, and there are some additional efficiencies possible when using one station for everything rather than separate dedicated stations - for example, if your home space port design already has 30 shield generators and 50 armor plates, you probably don't need to add another 15 shield generators and 20 armor plates to protect the lab space if you add labs to the home space port, but if you build a separate large research station to house all your scientists over the homeworld you should probably invest in reasonably formidable defenses on the station even though proximity to the homeworld's other orbital installations will provide some degree of protection.

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I was under the impression (from reading the research screen breakdown during the game) that it took the largest single scientist + location bonus to each field and applied that modifier. For example, if I have a station with 30% energy, 10% energy and 5% energy scientists, and the location grants 20%, I would have a 50% bonus (30 + 20) to energy research generated from the labs at that station.

Am I mistaken? It has been a little while since I've had more than 2 scientists in a playthrough so it's possible I read incorrectly.

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ORIGINAL: bubb_tubbs

Interesting! I had no idea the other bonuses also stacked with diminishing returns. The depth of this game!

Forgive me if I ask another again and further hijack this thread, but is there a coded racial maximum for scientists? I mean, is there a hard number each race can reach before no more will appear, even with structured research facility? (name escapes me)

Thanks again

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However each empire has a limit to the number of characters (based on empire size) and each character role (scientist, intelligence agent, etc) also has a limit. This character limit is roughly 6-7 for an empire with a single colony of 10 billion population at development level of 100. This scales up as your empire grows, although not in a straight line - as your empire grows the maximum character increase slows. When you have 20 or more characters, you will not get any random character appearance, instead only through events (e.g. new admiral from successful battle).

The limits for each character role are modified by your empire's dominant race (e.g. Quamenos can have more scientists). In the race files see specifically the settings CharacterRandomAppearanceChanceXXXXX for each character role.