/vr/ - Retro Games

Like every Civ game, you have a slider that allows you to allocate a percentage of your energy into research. However, the only indication of the result of your slider fuckery is "well, the next technology is coming in so-and-so turns".

Apparently, there's a penalty if the slider is less symmetrical. Am I wrong? At 60%, it's apparently 8% penalty on labs... Yet the research time improved. So what the fuck? Is this 8%:

1) An actual penalty on the end result of my *research*. Not money itself, but *research*. You know, like test tubes in Civilization.

2) An *inefficiency* penalty on total cash going into labs in particular, where the "-16%" economy is a penalty on cash that ends up in my pockets?