Haegemonia

• Save all your precious research points (RP) until you get the research upgrade (%5 cheaper research). It might not seem much, but the more you hoard your research points, the more you gain overall (The 5% saving on each thing accumulates just that little bit more in the long run). There's 1 or 2 more research upgrades too, but you do need to spend a little in the meantime.

• BUT, research the mining base earlier than you're supposed to, and only upgrade your corvettes as much as the plot tells you to. You'll have nastier ships later.

• Capture every planet, and upgrade them before advancing. Sometimes you come back to an area.

• Still hoarding RPs? Good. Now that you have spies you can steal tech from other races. Only research things that you've stolen prototypes for. Researching a prototype nets you a 50% RP discount, ON TOP of the 5%+15% discount from both upgrades.

• Yes, you CAN have all three (of 4) weapon branches maxed out. You're not supposed to be able to research everything, and the only thing that has ever stopped me doing so is not being able to actually CLICK the items in the list, because I've damn well got every bit of tech and the game isn't programmed for that to even be possible. It ends up with available research being off screen.