as far as i understand it, research is proportional to damage dealt, and doesnt scale with technology cost settings. but when i killed a small demolisher i instantly completed research thats meant to take 10k science (quality module 2 at 20x cost)
i dont think this is how its supposed to work, cuz otherwise vulcanus is extremely overpowered

That is a good point and not something I tested initially with the update. I have some ideas, though it make take some time to put together. When you say technology cost, do you mean the setting when starting a new game to scale the cost of research, or just the individual research as you go through the game? Just want to make sure I understand.

To add, it may not be a huge problem right now. Maybe get a few freebies, and from what I've seen on YouTube videos, it takes railguns to take the larger ones out. It seems that with Space Age, a lot of "free" stuff can happen. I have an idea for an adjustment in mind, could maybe turn that into an option.

Yes, by technology cost i mean the option when making a new game to scale the cost of research. I'm playing a 20x cost run and killing small demolishers finishes my entire queue

Thank you for confirming. I haven't done any testing with that game option. Another clarifying question, when you started that run, did you change the scaling at all in the settings? By default, it's set to 100, but can get as low as 1. Outside of the demolisher issue, how has this been performing at a 20x run?

The run started with the default scaling setting, I touched it for a bit during early game, testing 500, but eventually switched it back to default.

During the run I've probably gotten at least 7 of the more expensive researches with it before touching demolishers, but its not like i was purposefully causing constant attacks, i used solar since that's the laziest option but it did reduce the amount of attacks quite a lot
I'd say it performs fine on nauvis with regular settings, not a main source of research but helps

worth noting that I'm not a normal player, i take things very slow most of the time

Thank you very much for the feedback so far, it's helpful! That is noted and I have the same play style as well, I take my time. I'll try some adjustments, likely a if/else setup just for the demolishers with some scale that can be adjusted or turned off.

Good news! It didn't take as long as I expected and the patch has been published. Thank you for your feedback and info on this! There is a new setting to adjust the scale for demolishers, so I would appreciate your feedback on the default value of 100. This will now take the total health/damage on a kill and divide by 100 for the big demolisher. For medium it takes that at 50% of the value set, and small is 30%. It seems to scale well based on my testing last night. I also added notes to the settings so it's clear that higher values mean more research points.