Research Lab

“Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” – Wernher von Braun

The Research Lab brings the modern age of organised science to a city: dedicated laboratories, instruments and teams of specialists working on problems no lone scholar could tackle. Where the Library collects knowledge and the University teaches it, the Research Lab manufactures it.

Stats

Effects

• +50% research in the city, applied after every flat source. Stacks with the Library’s +25% and the University’s +50%, for up to +125%.

Strategy

The Research Lab is the last and most expensive step of the science chain, and it only pays off where there is research to multiply. Build it first in your highest-research cities – large ones with a Library and University already in place – and leave small cities for later. At 4 gold a turn it competes with your army for the treasury: an empire that wants both a large military and a full set of Research Labs has to pay for both.

Historical Background

Industrial research laboratories emerged in the late nineteenth century, when companies such as Edison’s Menlo Park workshop, Bayer and General Electric began employing teams of scientists to invent on purpose rather than by chance. Bell Labs, founded in 1925, became the model of the form: its researchers produced the transistor, information theory, the laser and the solar cell. Government laboratories followed during and after the Second World War, and the research laboratory became the engine of twentieth-century science.