Is researching Medical tech worth doing outside of active war? Say Tournament. Is it worth my turns? Should I invest in Bus/Res/Agri instead? Asking for a friend.

medical tech only helps bring down military losses when you get attacked and to cure bioterrors. So only for war and only when you are being attacked.

Nah invest all your money into medical.

and sell it for like 1500, and then rebuy it for like 9000..

Best way to totally end up top ranked..

It doesn't help with losses when you attack other countries?

that seems strange

In Fallout and Terminator having better understanding of medicine and trauma allows them to be more proficient killers. Should Med tech increase your kill ratio? That's reasonable.

I just found out the other day that the terminator series is the prequel to the matrix trilogy

Crazy stuff

I only answered about how it works, not how I think it should work. That is a bigger discussion.

Med tech shouldn't increase kill ratio, but decrease losses on attacking preferably. The reason I think this would be good is that it would make the tech more universally useful, increasing demand, and as a result also supply, throughout the reset and perhaps in servers where no one uses it now.
This won't solve any problems or improve the game in any way on its own, but I belive many such small changes that ultimately make netting and warring countries look more similar is what the game needs since the main issue facing this game since the start is that running a netting country well will always make you a sitting duck to a war prepped country even one built by someone who is really bad at the game and/or is spending much less time than you at the game.
If a well built netting country is what you need in order to war well, and vice versa, there will only be good countries and bad ones.
From what I understand, this is what the people on the other side say as well, that the game is bad because netters build 0 def countries and just hit bots that dont retal. They lack the game understanding to suggest solutions so they just suicide netters or defense-shame them. The admin crew are only here for a few months at a time during which they can't even begin to think of long term solutions, sometimes they make crutches, that moves the problem elsewhere, but that is it.