I'm sitting at rank 295 at the moment and I'm curious on how I'm comparing to others my level. I've been plowing on as usual for ages now but I'm wondering if my Research is a bit low for my rank or what.
Welcome to what I consider the "mid-game".. I'm growing increasingly worried that I'll be an easy target in the next hundred levels.

not bad. ahead on some and behind on others ( not saying what )

and, under rank 300 with 8207 RP/per hr, thats good i think. but i must ask where your AP and MP are at?

Yeah, your research seems fine, and you definitely should finish Star Lifting now. If your AP isn't high, you can probably start focusing more on that now.

yea it may be he cant pay for that tech (and maxes his RP capacity in about 5 hours), OR, his AP/per hr is crap, or both

As others have said, your RP/hr is pretty good for your rank. Finish Star Lifting, then hit Scanners HARD. At your rank you would be hard pressed to afford construction/upkeep on the top tier equipment so don't worry about Quasi's and Proxies for now. Ignore cloak until last. You already realize you're hitting the mid-game area, and this is where Artifact and Mining production really become important. Mining to pay for stuff of course, and Artifact because you should soon start shifting your rank points away from decks. You'll need the Ship-Bots for that. Artifacts will also net you Rescued Prisoners, Helmsman, and XchargeCells. These will be needed to really get your ship going. Star Chart Purgers will also come, enabling you (along with scan tech) to get more "worthwhile" planets. At this point in the game you'll also want to shift your planet focus away from Research planets and let the Android Scientists do the work for you. After your next scan blitz (after hyper-flux mk3) I would do the Trans-Temporal Drives and Exergonic Inverters (remember you can have 4 of EACH thrusters and dampeners), then some Base tech research before finishing the top tier of each tech.

Most important... DO NOT fast rank from here. The faster you get to rank 350, the sooner you'll be dealing with Crimson Flamehawks in addition to the Stryll Assassins. When you first start getting Flamehawks, they will be just as (if not more) difficult to deal with as the already tough Assassins.

Flamehawks were not bad for me. Just ate alot of energy.

By ranking slowly, rank points from level ups and rescued prisoners can be funneled into Tactical Officers instead of decks. More attack with the same amount of decks means Flamehawks won't "eat alot of energy"

Or put rank points into energy. 3 rank points is one extra hit whereas it's only 6 extra attack. Once I hit massive levianth I slewed my rank points from ship size into energy with a few into tactical officers.

Totally agree with the scanners thing. If you do a lot of NPC hunting then you'll get lots of toxic purifiers to boost your mining and plamnetary data optimisers to boost research but there's noting to boost arti production. That's why good scanners are important.

An important thing is your ship build. As you've probably discovered it's too expensive to install a lot of the tech you've got unless you're a builder. I'm not and my upkeep is 2.6 billion a day at rank 430+. Uninstalling and reinstalling hyperchannel relays also eats credits. That's why mining becomes important then once you've done about 43million research you can get credits from research contracts.

Darth reason they were easy for me was I had a goal of getting 1k of each officer when I hit 300.. I stopped decks and built them up. Probably had a good number of them to help.

Best thing is to get the Melter, crystalizer line going to get to the irradiation planets. Ask Darth on that. Grr

whats star lifting? :O

Star lifting is the + 12 resource buildings

Yep. Gotta love those 17x and 18x mining massive irradiated planets.

They're really expensive. I only stick them on Extremely Rich or above planets.

"Someone" prematurely nuked Tristhian, so its only 15x, but still 500mp/hr makes for a nice planet to liberate...

And yes, Chakotay, I understand what you're saying after you actually said something constructive. That's why I already advised him to shift his rank points away from decks.

I ran into trouble in the last 100 levels with Sabs and my Artifact planets. I had a little over 6000 AP/h and it dwindled down to 3500 from planet theft. I had to switch from Builder to Excavator to compensate a tad and my Mining is high enough to cover my 2.6b Upkeep plus an extra bil at the moment. So I'll finish my +12 Art buildings and go for Scanning so I can try and catch back up on my Artifacts.

Once I hit 2500 decks (I kept telling myself I should really slow down around 1800) I moved onto Tactical Officers. My attack was really lacking
Thanks for your input guys.