Empires & Allies Research Lab and Guide to Research

Just a little while ago I told you about the unreleased Research Lab and research feature in Empires & Allies and apparently Zynga didn’t waste any time: today I saw that the research feature has gone live in the game and we can start building our research Labs and start researching to improve our Land Units (for the moment).

So, what is a Research Lab and what does it do in E&A? Well, these are new buildings that allow us to research upgrades, making our units more powerful, less expensive, and faster to build! The first available research lab is the Army Research Lab (find it under the military buildings tab) and you can see the requirements below:

After building the research lab, you will be allowed to start the research for improving your units. This will be a very long process and I really doubt that anybody will manage to upgrade all their units too soon: first of all, you will have to gather some parts for being allowed to start the upgrade process:

Then, you will be able to start the actual upgrade process which will take time and resources:

Once you’ve done the research, you can upgrade the unit five different times, with different bonuses. Each upgrade will affect all units of that type! For instance, if you research higher damage on your Cadet Soldiers, all Cadet Soldiers you own (and any you build from then on) will do more damage.

You will also see the upgrades you’ve made during battles:

My advice would be to upgrade as much as possible while the Army Research Lab is out since pretty soon we’ll see released in Empires & Allies the Air and Water research labs and things will become even more difficult.

What do you think about the research feature in the game?