Why am I always behind in research?

What difficulty level?  The AIs get large bonuses on higher difficulty levels.

Do you have any of the anomalies (esp purple and green) developed with bases and modules?

As soon as you can, get a few diplo techs early and bribe the AIs into mutual wars.  You also benefit from bribing minor AIs into Research and Eco treaties.

How many planets do you have compared to the AI players?  Four planets is a pretty small empire unless you're on a very tiny galaxy.

200-500 research is also not much; your research capital should generate 1000+ on its own (nearly every space on it should be a research building).  Are you using economic starbases to boost your research production?  Do you have mining bases on all of the purple (research) resources you can find?  Are you going 100% research allocation on the economy panel?

Hmmmm... about the only thing I haven't been doing is the bribing for wars amongst themselves, and 100% research.  How do you guys get 1000 research alone?  100% production spending?

 

And for that map, 4 planets was a lot.  the biggest AI had 5.  It was a random map, and I got rare stars and rare worlds or something.

Yes.  If you develop your economy properly, you should usually be able to stay at 100% production spending through the entire game, and if I'm going heavy research, I try to keep 100% research as much as I can too.  Having a x7 research world and so few planets makes this harder, because it lets you spend a huge amount of money on research every turn.

So, you need to bolster your research using the techniques in my last post, but you also need to bolster your economy so that it can support doing that much research and at least break even (and preferably still make a profit).

Tips for boosting your economy:

• People.  More people = more income.  I usually put one farm and one morale-boosting building on each planet, and keep a relatively low tax rate while the population is growing, to max it out faster (100% approval on the planet doubles population growth).  Never add more than one farm, and be careful about putting farms on farm-boosting squares, as if the population max goes over 20B, it gets very hard to keep them happy. 
• Once your population is maxed out, jack the taxes up as high as you can while still maintaining a 60% or so overall approval.  Mining yellow resources can make your people happier, which lets you raise taxes further.
• Starbase mine green resources
• Set up as many trade routes as you can with friendly civs; preferably between large, distant planets.
• Build more economic buildings.  Every square that you don't need for something else should have an economic building on it.  If you can't run at 100% production even once your population is full, you need to replace some of your factories and/or labs with economic buildings.  What race are you?  If you have access to them, stock markets are really effective; I usually try to get them as early as possible.

 

Also, is tech trading and tech brokering on . . . wait, this is DA.  My little experience with DA was that the AIs will all just trade techs amongst themselves until they all share the same techs.  It makes it virtually impossible to out-research them, as you are up against the collective research capabilities of all the AIs together.

Sorry for no real input. 

Have you tried an All Fac or an All Lab approach?  You can search the forum threads for the "how to" info.

 

What is the reason to keep people happy? In the game I'm playing out at the moment (going for score and nearing the end) I have an overall happiness of 26%. It doesn't seem to hurt anything. No planets are growing at this point but neither are there any negative consequences. I always put farms on farm-boosting squares when available. It seems to me that when a planet reaches its maximum population (which varies depending on planet quality, tax rate, racial morale as modified by some techs, trade goods, and mining of morale resources, and by morale improvments on the planet), that's it for that planet. It won't grow further but neither will it have any problems. Further changes in the situation (e.g. raising or lowering the tax rate) will cause the planet to shrink or grow in population. Nonetheless I don't see any reason to not allow it (e.g. by building two farms, the max I've found useful, or by building a farm on +300% farming bonus tile, to reach its maximum "balanced" (neither growing nor shrinking) size, and thus reach its maximum economic potential.

Might this be something which is version-specific? I'm using ToA 2.03.

Same question applies as above. To me it seems that maintaining an approval level of 20% or higher is all that is required. And that the only consequence for allowing a planet to fall that low in approval is that it won't grow anymore regardless of its theoretical maximum population.

Edit: I should qualify the above by saying that it does matter in election turns. On those turns (about twice per year) it is important to have a higher approval so that you continue to get your political party bonuses. Somewhere above 60% approval seems important in those turns. I shoot for near 70% by reducing taxes in those turns. Some people think this is a cheesy approach. Me, I think that a number of workable techniques in this game are cheesy but this isn't one of them. To me it reasonably mimics real world political campaigns which promise whatever it takes at election time, including the incumbent party's icing the cake with some temporary candy.

The elections were what I had in mind.  While I do recognize the cynical realism of pandering to the electorate right before the vote, taking advantage of it does seem cheesy to me; or at least, out of "character" if I'm not playing Evil.  But yes, if it doesn't bother you to play a slick politician, you can target an approval of 25% or so.  Just don't lose track of the election, or you're certain to get voted out.

IMHO, there should be some hysteresis to the approval ratings, so that the population has a little longer memory of ill-treatment (and, on the other side, a little more forgiveness of temporary hardship).  Having the turn of the election be the only one that matters exaggerates the people's manipulability to the point of parody.

I second that. It would make the game more realistic and more interesting, requiring more tradeoffs than the current twice per year adjustments.

Hi!

With 700% research bonus tile and playing all-labs, 1000 flasks should be doable, if you can manage that financially. With so few habitable planets Trade Ships should be your main money-maker, covering that big money sink.

 

With all-labs you lack production output and money, not research. Better spend bonuses for that. In DA econ bonuses are almost mandatory: if you have money, you can BUY a ship. If you don't have money (what's the usual atate of affairs ) , you need production bonuses to build faster.

 

Tech brokering. Like others already said, AIs in DA do that very often.
So be better at that than they are: when you get an appropriate tech, you sell it to EVERY civ in the universe. Also when you buy one such tech, you do the same. Having good diplomatic ability for that is a must hovewer, so never sell diplo techs, and weapons and defense techs you intend to use.

BR,  Iztok