Rail Nation Buildings: Laboratory

Rail Nation is an online railway strategy game that has been around since 2013. For the millions of railway fanatics found around the world, as well as the discerning game enthusiast, Rail Nation provides all interested strategy gamers the chance to start their own railway company. You can manage transport systems and team up with associations to spread your rail empire far and wide.

 

Rail Nation - an Introduction

The main aim of the game is to collect as many prestige points as you can. There are many different ways of doing this, such as running goods, investing in industries, or completing competitions. Teamwork is key in the game, with your own success depending on how well you cooperate with other players and cities in your territory. There are six ‘era’ which last for 14 days in real-time, with fifty different cities fighting it out to make it to the end. By the end of the sixth era, the top ten cities go on to the endgame, and the final victor is the city that sends all the goods.

 

Getting Started

When you first log in, you have to create an avatar and select which city you start in. We recommend you choose a city that has the least players in it - but feel free to choose from the list! You’ll then go through a tutorial that will lay out all the basics of the game and get you primed and ready to take the rail world by storm.

 

You don’t just start with a simple railway station, however. There are eleven different buildings that are a part of your rail empire - License Trade, Bank, Construction Yard, Track Production, Engine House, Station Concourse, Hotel, Restaurant, Shopping Centre, Lottery, and Laboratory. All of these buildings are really important in Rail Nation, and can help you expand and advance your rail empire. We’re going to focus on one of the more important buildings in Rail Nation - the Laboratory. Read on to find out about the Rail Nation Laboratory.

 

Rail Nation: Laboratory

All your buildings in Rail Nation are important in your quest to become a rail mogul; however the Laboratory is up there with one of the more important structures in your repertoire. The Laboratory in Rail Nation helps to generate and also stores Research Points. Research Points are essential in furthering your technologies and upgrades. There is a dedicated Research Area on the play screen that will show you research from both your current and past era. You are also able to hire a Researcher in your Laboratory, who will help to generate more Research Points at the cost of 40 gold for 24 hours (so pretty expensive!). Using a Researcher will also generate your Research Points 25% faster too.

 

The Laboratory in Rail Nation requires regular upgrades to keep your Research Point level as high as possible, and also to help the speed the Research Points generate at. It’s worth noting that for each level of the Laboratory in Rail Nation, you can only generate a certain number of Research Points. Once you hit this limit, the new Research Points disappear, so keep an eye on those points and make sure you use them when you can!

 

Laboratory: Research Times

Below is a table showing the time in minutes that it takes to generate one Research Point (RP), as well as the maximum number of Research Points you can store, the cost of upgrading and the base time for upgrading and also the Prestige Points you get from upgrading to this level. As we mentioned earlier in this article, Prestige Points pretty much determine the winner of the game, so you want to get as many of these as you can!

 

Laboratory Level	Minutes for 1RP	Max. Number of RP	Upgrade Cost	Upgrade Base Time	Upgrade Prestige Points
1	135	6	-	-	-
2	120	7	15 000	0h 5m	2
3	105	8	40,000	0h 45m	5
4	97,5	8	120,000	1h	10
5	90	9	225,000	1h 30m	15
6	90	11	420,000	1h 30m	20
7	82,5	11	650,000	3h	25
8	75	11	1,000,000	3h 30m	30
9	75	13	1,500,000	4h	40
10	67,5	13	2,000,000	5h	50

 

 

The Laboratory level in Rail Nation goes all the way up to 25, but this handy table gives you a good idea of timings and RP generation for starters. 

 

Final Thoughts

Recently, Rail Nation developed the idea of a ‘split’ Laboratory. This would basically mean you have 2 laboratories in essence, and it would be up to you to decide whether you use this for speeding up research and increasing the frequency of RP production, or increasing the maximum storage for RP. So that’s some really handy information about the Rail Nation Laboratory. A really useful building to keep upgraded, it can really benefit your track in lots of different ways - from faster engines through to those precious Prestige Points.