4X game. The planet was explored, the scout ship was there you know what's there, it's ready for colonization. But they found something special, some ruins of an extinct alien race or some singularity and you needed to pursue this if you want to find out what's there (and get the goodies :D). It's not a job for scouts or explorers, it's a job for *imperial archeologists team* :D

So, what you think? How such archelogists mechanic should work? What decisions are involved? Does it overall make sense? Or maybe just stick to classic "send a scout and you know everything"?

It could be a sort of "random" event (perhaps the ruins are setted from the beginning, but discovered after a certain/uncertain amount of time, maybe some technologies, population density and/or other factors affect the chances of the discovering happening, or perhaps is just a random roll each turn -was it turn based?), then the player receives a notification explaining that "some ancient ruins have been discovered in your colony X" and then the player can choose to ignore it or send an expedition.

Sending an expedition, of course, requires resources and time. Maybe the player can decide how many resources to invest between a range. When the expedition is sent, after some amount of time, he receives another notification indicating the result of the expedition. Some outcomes that I come with that could be fun:

• The expedition was successful, now the player has new resources, new technologies, or a powerful artifact.
• The expedition failed. However, the player is able to send a new expedition, if he has been niggard, now he has the chance to spend more resources to ensure an acceptable chance of success.
• The expedition was a disaster. Some ancient artifact has been activated and is out of control, or some ancient horror has been awakened or other undesirable consequence and now the player has one more problem to address.

I wouldn't make a mechanic much more complex than that if it's not the core idea of the game, it could get tedious fast.

I would add a "task difficulty" rating to any of these and a skill level to the archeologists.

It then gives you another layer to the game expierience. You can have technology advances that help the team, and sending a team to a site early on in the game becomes a real risk. You could get a massive advantage, or you could wake up the ravanous bug blatter beast of Traal and that planet becomes uninhabitable.

The jeopardy / reward level will be up to you to control though.

What about blending this with the idea you've talked about in other threads concerning corporations. You could have things like funding, cost overruns, reputation of companies and maybe even some idea of ethical / unethical behavior (Weyland-Yutani in Aliens) that might have cascading consequence (like smuggling a xenomorph through quarantine). Or a simpler method would be building either science ships or funding a research program. You could do both, making research more expensive but more on demand, as well.

Decisions could be generic or custom to the situation. Generic decisions might involve whether to move or hide the artifact, which could be useful if in alien territory and might have consequences (OnMoved = Destabilizes Star, OnMoved = Triggers Unseen Defender). Custom actions might be things like whether or not to wipe out natives defending the artifact, compensate them, try to use psy-ops to get them to flee the area, send anthropologists to gain cultural literacy (and thus find out what influences them).

Adding something like this would be a chance to give your 4X unique flavor. It could also be an interesting mechanic that helps alleviate boredom, especially early game. There is logically no reason why discoveries can't be made continually, even on settled worlds.

This might take your idea farther afield that desired, but what if you had interest groups that could interact with artifacts? Billionaire collectors could give you money, terrorists could seek to use them as bombs, do-gooder treasure hunters might use them to stop an alien invasion, spies could steal them to start a war. Lots and lots of possibilities, especially if they had a wide range of effects akin to what Avalander described.

I've played a couple of archeology themed games. One was a worker-placement time management game (which is basically an RTS with no combat and one complex pre-created map where the whole campaign takes place instead of many simpler maps). Two or three were adventure games. And the last one was a puzzle-campaign game where playing a puzzle minigame metaphorically represented each step of archeological work.

It'd be kind of funny if you found ancient extraterrestrial machines of enormous power, but had no idea what to do with them. Superweapons, terraforming devices, technology caches, doomsday alien summoners... but they all have randomized shapes, and your scientists say, "We don't know what this is. Should we (a) launch it at an enemy, (b) bury it in the ground, (c) try to open it, (d) leave it there and make it a tourist attraction, or (e) launch it into empty space and destroy all records of it?" If you choose right, you get the benefit; if you choose wrong you get no benefit or an enormous disaster. But either way, you know next time that any future Mirrored Icosahedrons that you find should be launched at the enemy and never, ever opened.

Note it's just a subsystem of a subsystem not a whole game (subsystem of exploration subsystem), so it must be quite simple...

Like: You discovered ruins on a planet which unlocks "excavate ruins on XXX" mission. Then you allocate your archelogists to these "missions". To fully excavate you need 10 turns let's say, but first 2-3 turns make it excavated like 70%. So, the idea is you have more of these ruins to explore than ever time to do it fully (so you need to choose).

Anyway, do you think it's worth pursuing or should just be dropped?

Just a historic anectdote

Mayan ruins in central america : many ruins not found until clearcutting of jungle (obscuring terrain) for banana plantations and even then large numbers of ruins (thousands) still remain unsurveyed (let alone excavated) to this day.

Some major ruins were so lost in time and obscured that even the local people no longer knew they were there.

The real understanding of the lost mayan culture came from a few key people decyphering their language from comparing information gathered over the span of 100 years (stuff was found but really reading what was contained was very difficult)

So factors like that - how might the ruins be obscured/hidden, what local people might be there to gain hints from, how 'obscure'/unintelligable the information might be to the archeologists/historians/etc...

I love the archaeologist idea!! Ruins are definitely something that should be studied by and archaeologist/anthropologist, so it's very plausible and very realistic to use space archaeologists!! It looks like you already sort of have this planned out, so it's an awesome idea. Run with it!!