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Research Credits Explained

The fact that XCOM: Enemy Unknown has worked out to be many things for the XCOM series - a serious series reboot, the implementation of literally a generation of player wants and suggestions, and what may very well be the most polished and sincerely perfect RTS title of the year, the natural result of this is that the folks who developed the game not only created what is already widely considered to be a cult-classic, but they managed to create a game that has layers of complexity built into it, much of which is not easily grasped or understood.

Among the various elements that generate confusion in their own right is the subject of "Research Credits" and how it applies to the developing tech that makes up the kit that the player uses to help influence the outcome of the struggle to find parity with the aliens and, eventually, conquer them.

It would be great if the aliens had some obvious or even concealed weakness - like being allergic to carrots or the common cold being a deadly virus to them - but they do not. That means defeating them will take the proper application of military tactics and strategy along with a ruthless willingness to exploit and research the technology that can be created by recovering the crumbs of the alien tech that remain after we shoot up their invasion forces or shoot down one of their ships!

As we work our way through the reverse-engineering process, and begin to create our own versions of their weapons based upon a better understanding of the tech that they arrived with, we find the area of research which takes place in the Labs and through the brilliant mind of the Ice Princess in charge of researching the alien tech, the completed research seems to be split between the Research Archives and Research Credits. This Wiki Page is intended to make sense of that.

The Research Archive

Basically this is a repository for the knowledge that has been gained so far as you progress through the game, and contains summary publication of each major area of research - which includes representative samples like:

• Basic Knowledge on Xeno-Biology
  
• Advanced Knowledge on Alien Materials
  
• Autopsy Results
  

That nicely sums up the archived information, but does little or nothing to explain the contents and purpose of the second section in Research Documentation - the Research Credits...

Research Credits

According to the section description in the game this section is defined as being where you can "See the projects on which you have earned research credits."

The first example of the contents of the Research Credit Section will likely be Basic Armor Technology, which in summary includes the following description:

Although gruesome and seemingly hobbled together, the Floater does have significantly better armor plating than anything currently available to our forces. Having completed the interrogation process on the subject, we've come to understand how this armor balances flexibility, weight, and damage reduction to suit the Floater's "unique" capabilities. With that in mind, we should be able to reduce the time to research initial armor prototypes.

Based upon the understandable confusion that has cropped up over Research Credits based I suspect largely upon the choice of words in the name, it will help you to understand first what Research Credits are NOT. They are not a form of value or a value object number that you can exchange for research in the game. Yeah, I know that the name sort of implies that this is precisely what they are, but take my word for it, that is not it.

What Research Credits Actually Are
In simple terms the Research Credits that you earn or unlock in the game are in essence credit for knowledge that translates into speed and ease. That is to say that the acquisition of Research Credits in each specific area of technology has the direct result of speeding up your acquisition of deeper bits of tech related to and under that specific technology.;

Research Credits are obtained through the direct result of the interrogation of live aliens. It is not entirely clear if you could improve the results based upon repeated interrogation of the same types of aliens, but what we can say with absolute authority is that with each specific type of alien that you manage to capture and subsequently interrogate, your pool of knowledge and the available tech that is related to it increases immensely.

Each credit obtained reduces the time to complete associated research projects by 50% which will have immense impact upon the continued development of related tech. These technologies are broken out and organized by their primary, or top-level, technologies, which consist of:

• All Technology: unlocked by Interrogate Ethereal
  
• Armor Technology: unlocked by Interrogate Berserker
  
• Basic Armor Technology: unlocked by Interrogate Floater
  
• Beam Weapons: unlocked by Interrogate Sectoid
  
• Flight: unlocked by Interrogate Heavy Floater
  
• Plasma Weaponry: unlocked by Interrogate Muton, Muton Elite Autopsy
  
• Psionics: unlocked by Interrogate Sectoid Commander
  
• UFO Technology: unlocked by Interrogate Thin Man
  
• Weapons Technology: unlocked by Interrogate Muton Elite
  

When you break each of the above out within the Research Credit scheme each of the primary tech subjects represents a specific and well-defined collection of related tech subjects, which have been nested under this page which defines generally what the expanded pages on the above branches define specifically!