A better way if you want to play with research cost is to make a new facility, one that generates more research points for you. The AI won't use it unless you mod them. That takes time, but its well worth the effort.
Modding your own game is a lot of fun. You can blow an entire night easily just messing around with the files learning them, and changing them.
It can be a challenged, but there are a lot of excellent resources out there. Fyrons Modding Tutorial site, is a great place to start.
If you want to add a lot of flare to your current games, just combine a couple of mods like Fyrons Quadrant mod and say Proportions. That should really get you into a game of epic proportions.
Re: two newbie questions about mods
Threaded Mode