I really like the idea of this mod. Seems much better for research to require a specific rate of science production, rather than a specific "rate times duration".

I thought of one exploit though: If you have say 10 science production per minute, you can save up science in a chest for 10 minutes and then put it in a bunch of labs to get 100 SPM for one minute, cheating the rate requirement.

In fact even if you're producing 10 SPM and a science only requires 5 SPM, it's still better to save science in a chest to minimize the amount of science lost to decay.

One way to fix this exploit is to add a spoilage timer to all science packs so they have to be used quickly. Although that still allows a bit of an exploit since you can save up ingredients for the science packs in chests, and then only build the last step of production to the required SPM, and build everything before that to a lower SPM.

Then again I'm not sure it's worth trying to fix these "exploits" since a player who installs this mod is opting into this challenge anyway, they can simply decide not to save science in chests.

For now the thoughts on said exploit is that by having the research be long enough, it's kinda not feasible to 'save up' so many researches up to the point that that works for later techs.

However tbh that exploit does give a good-ish bypasses on some of the early on techs, where you might just not gonna enjoy scaling up early stuff anyways.

Best would of cause be properly tweaked research numbers, but... well mod supports and etc and my limited time. So...

Adding some sort of 'decay' for all sciences however does perhaps have potential, tho I guess at that point you might actually need to add decay for, well, all items, so players aren't just instead stockpiling the ingredients.