What's the best Civ...

[jbarry39]

For pure science/research/exploration?

[Darasv]

Some combination of Materialist/Egalitarian for increased research speed and specialist (researcher) output, along with the Meritocracy civic for an even further increase to specialist output. You have a lot of choices for other civics, but ones like Dark Consortium are worth looking at as they will give you additional resources from the researchers you'll be getting. You'll also want to give your starting species traits that'll help your research output like Intelligent.

Origin could be Mechanist or Syncretic Evolution so that you have a population that is more suited to managing worker strata jobs while your smarter main species takes care of research. I personally go for Ocean Paradise as I love playing aquatic species, but Life-Seeded would also give you a boost to researcher output, and the Remnants origin would also provide archaeo-engineer jobs that are essentially extra researchers.

Last thing to look at would be your council, which you'll probably want to stock with scientists that will specialize into statisticians, so make sure your civic choices support council positions that can be filled by scientists. Also make sure you take traits to increase research speed like Spark of Genius and Maniacal whenever you can on your councilors.

[Kalemenos]

Excellent ideas. And I agree, aquatics is great fun.

Also, there's the Technocracy civic, too, which gives you science directors, which give more research than regular researchers.

Habitats and ringworlds, when designated as research sites, give bonus research.

If you connect your empire to a scholarium vassal, every scientist on the network gets a +10% bonus. Not so with planets.

If you can afford the cons. goods, designate a species rights/living standards to Academic Privilege, and you get more sci with that.

Voidborn origin gives +15% bonus, and yes that applies to tech too. In a recent Voidborn origin game, by doing some of these things, in the late game had scientists on habitats producing 15.17/14.77/14.77 (the three types of tech) research, and the sci director was pumping out 21.5/20.9/20.9 - with 30 scientists and 2 sci directors on each research habitat. That's nearly 400 of each tech type per each of my 20 or so research habitats. (I'm playing 3.4.7 so habitats might work a little differently now). I was pumping out a cool 27k sci, it was great.