[PvK]

Well, it's sort of useful as a rough mesure of the amount of extra time required by the higher difficulty settings, although most of the cost is probably in the high-level techs.

I don't think you should include the techs that are included even if you set it to Low starting tech, though, since that never happens. It probably makes little difference, though. I think there might be a minimum research generation, though, so in theory if you modded the tech areas file so applied research 1 wasn't given at the start, it would still be eventually possible...

PvK