Advancing The Idea Of Research In 4X Games

Research is a wildly undervalued area of 4x games. My belief has always been that all aspects of 4x should have the depth of the combat part and I have set out to make that so. Below I will lay out my vision for an incredible 4x research system.

First I'll start with the most boring part. For basic things like crop growing I don't think interactive research is super valuable. My plan is that provinces will slowly advance in this area mostly automatically. You will gain general crop knowledge that will slowly disseminate across your empire and you will gain regional and biome crop knowledge as well. I am considering knowledge for every specific crop as well, may be too much. You will also slowly gain knowledge in areas like construction, livestock management, etc. You can invest in infrastructure later in the game to increase the growth and spread of this knowledge.

Now we can get to the more interesting areas of research. This aspect involves magical and technical skills. In a previous post I described broad worldly issues regarding magic. Magic has a total level of power and it becomes increasingly difficult to generate new magical knowledge as you approach the total. However the specifics of how research is conducted must be addressed. Every character in the game is capable of research. Using their resources they can put money, time, minions, etc into their research budget. Any character involved in research gains the fruits of their own labor and their controller if they have one does as well.

This system has many implications. There is a substantial incentive to do most serious research yourself or to not allow subordinates access to more powerful knowledge. These people could easily sell you out or attempt to supplant you. However you can also engage in sneaky plots to steal supporters and knowledge from your enemies or even allies.

You have some interesting political and economic choices as well. You could create a highly educated magical society but that may reduce your relative power. Hoarding knowledge will make it harder to get more research done but will allow you to have extremely serious leverage over the less magically gifted. It is probably easier for dictatorial rulers to hoard knowledge and populist ones to spread it around. But both groups still have their troubles.

What knowledge you actually get is somewhat random. You can sort of research magical fields or focus on improving existing knowledge, and your learning is somewhat granular. There is no option to research say, a "levitating airship/weapons platform."

Magical knowledge can come from discovery or boons from supernatural forces as well. Its not purely a research game. I may put up some other articles about the connection of research to society and culture later. But I think the character focused system, which is unlike even the character based system in Stellaris by Paradox, is unique and has a lot of potential for emergence.