I'm playing on the standard speed, and to be honest I find myself gunning down the economy route without much regard to military, as when I build catapults and such I find that within a matter of turns they're out-done by other means of warfare.

Would playing the game on the slowest setting keep players in the ages more? Because I'm finding myself whipping through the BC's and into AD500-ish without batting an eyelid, with the real meat of the game being in the early Victorian times.

So would slowing down the game slow the research but still allow me to build units and improvements as normal? I don't want to be waiting 30 turns to build a warrior when it would usually be taking 5 but I feel that me and the other nations are researching new technologies and civics far too quickly for the game to be any fun other than hitting enter time and time again.

I used to play Marathon a lot, but have lately started to play Normal speed games. The biggest difference is that there are actual space races now - there was never a hint of one in Marathon.

I too find that I focus less on my military when playing Normal speed. I think there's a couple of reasons for that - first, I know there's less of a production penalty for unit builds at Marathon speed, so I consciously build more of them at that speed. Second, unit upgrades are much cheaper at Normal speed, so there's more of an option to upgrade stale units in an emergency, and consequently it's less crucial to have a modern army at all times.

So would slowing down the game slow the research but still allow me to build units and improvements as normal? I don't want to be waiting 30 turns to build a warrior when it would usually be taking 5 but I feel that me and the other nations are researching new technologies and civics far too quickly for the game to be any fun other than hitting enter time and time again.

On Epic everything scales equally. You'll get more turns to use the military, which can allow you to get more benefit from the military (or lose benefit, if you're on the short end of the stick).

On Marathon, unit building does NOT scale up as much as the improvement building and research. So building military in Marathon doesn't slow as much as other things.