Cultural Studies

I can't answer all of them, but Education Achievement, for instance, increases rate of research by a percentage (1%/level in the Balance Mod), Recreation increases happiness (same rate), I think there's one for loyalty, etc.

I don't pretent to have figured out when it's worth spending the research points.

Hope that helps.

It is worth spending points in when you have spare research (not ready to research new facs as you are still doing the last round of upgrades, and your ships are a match for anything out there).

I can't remember them all off the top of my head, but Maths gives bonus to research, education to loyalty and assimilation of aliens, Leisure Services helps reproduction.

If you look in the help menu it tells you what they do (once you have researched culture). You could also look in the manual or at the online manual at wikipedia.

Are all worth while and give you a selection of bonuses to you empire based on tech level. They also seem to have a positive effect on your empires mood thus helping to prevent those riots and the need to build army’s of police (small cheap troop units) to put them down. I regularly spend research points on them as the empire develops past the starting out point. The only thing is that the tech levels are quite expensive but that’s not really an issue given how easy it is to get to 10Ok plus research pints

They also give you something to do with all that left over research late game Ever level accounts as a Empire Wide bonus according to their descriptions. Click on the ? icon and check Culutral Achievements for details on what each one does.

Click on the Question Mark/Help button at the top. It shows the effects of each Cultural Achievment, although at first the percentages are at zero percent. They must show what you currently have.

I'm currently researching Mathematics.

Education doesn't give you much of an improvement per level compared to actually researching Research facilities, but it's cheaper and once you have it it works on all your research instead of having to upgrade all your facilities. I have a big game and tons of research points and I've been spending the occasional points on education, just to use up extra points and keep ahead of my enemy, and with a very large empire and hundreds of warships it makes things slightly easier to use up a few spare points on things like economics just to reduce maintenance costs a bit.

I believe there was originally the intention of have empires generate Cultural Points that would be used to "research" the Cultural Advancements, but it got shelved at some point and the Cultural Advancements just got converted to use Research Points.