Research

§ To survive, your civilization must advance and grow technologically. Being backwards is suicide; advanced civilizations have huge advantages in expansion, growth, commerce, production, and, of course, in military units available to them. Your army may outnumber mine by ten to one, but if your army consists of archers and spearmen and mine of musketmen and macemen, you are going to get your butt seriously kicked. A small technological edge is powerful, while a large one is killer. (See Technology for more information on this important subject.)
§ Each turn your civilization generates "research points" which go toward acquiring new technologies. The more research points generated, the faster your civilization will learn new technologies.
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Generating Research Points

§ The number of "research points" that you create each turn is determined by the amount of Commerce the laborers in your cities generate. As your cities work the land around them, they earn food, production, and commerce. You use the "research button" to determine how much of that commerce you want to turn into research and how much you want in gold (see following). Only commerce generated by your cities can be turned into research: monies you earn from trading, pillaging and looting, merchant activities, and so forth are not available for this purpose.
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The Research Button

§ The research button on the game's main screen displays the current percentage of your commerce you are dedicating to research. At game start it is set at 100%; you can change this at any time.
§ If your treasury is running low and your current research percentage would cost more commerce than you can spend, the game automatically lowers your research percentage to the highest percentage that you can afford. (You can manually adjust it even lower, of course.) Note that the game does not ever INCREASE your research percentage; any increases must be made manually by you.
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Increasing Research Points

§ To get the maximum possible research points, first turn your research percentage up as far as it will go without bankrupting yourself. After that, there are a number of other things you can do. These include:
§ Construct Libraries and Other Buildings
§ Buildings such as Libraries and Monasteries will increase a city's research.
§ Assign Scientist Specialists
§ Change some of your city's populace into Scientist Specialists. Wonders such as the Great Library allow you to change more of your populace into scientists.
§ Civics
§ Civics like Free Religion and Representation increase your civilization's research.
§ Increase Commerce
§ Another way to speed up research is to increase the amount of commerce that your cities are generating. Building Cottages with workers, settling more cities on the coast, and signing Open Borders agreements with other civilizations will all generate more commerce in your cities.
§ Increase Wealth
§ Ironically, you can also increase the amount of research your civ is producing by generating more gold. Building Markets and Banks will increase the amount of gold your civ is producing, which will usually allow you to increase the research button (see above) and thus generate more overall research! See the Wealth entry for more information on generating gold.
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Expending Research Points

§ All research points are used to acquire Technology. See that subject for more information.