Research really needs to be speeded up a bit, or to have an option to speed it up a lot. Something to research, or maybe even have each research station reduce research times a bit. If I want to build ships faster, I can build more shipyards, but I can't do a thing to speed up research, and I've had so many techs in line to be researched that I can't see them all on the list (I like to research everything, so sue me).

From a gameplay perspective I don't think having research take quite a bit less time would effect anything. If you can afford to research something, you should get it done pretty fast. If people start blazing through the tech tree, increase the cost of research, personally I'd rather have techs cost twice as much but have them be almost instant.

Perhaps add a three level tech to the left of the psidar techs in the empire tech tree (three levels like the metal techs, each with two researches, so that the time for techs would be about cut in half if you researched all of it).

One other thing I'd like to see is more levels in the researches, so that you could increase the metal mining a bit more etc. It doesn't horribly imbalance anything if you just double all the techs that have 2 or 3 researches on each icon. That's definately a matter of opinion though, but I'd like to have you guys try it.