Most everyone who has played a 4X game has encountered a tech tree. These tech trees can be traversed using stuff like research points or just with a time allotment and allow you to unlock new skills, equipment, and, if you aren't at the end, more tech. Mostly these things are passive, you click on them and either immediatly recieve something, or will recieve something in a few turns or 30 seconds or so.
Now, what if you wanted to make the act of researching engaging and fun? How can we make researching fun? i have some ideas which I'll lay out here, but I would like some suggestions and feedback on the idea.
Idea 1: Make the player engage with a system in order for research to progress.
Idea 2: Allow the player to engage with the process but don't make it mandatory.
Idea 3: Make the process fun to watch.
Idea 1 would be something like clicking certain things or solving a puzzle to finish the research, and could be a fun little mini game. Problems crop up when you embed this into a larger game like Civ. Where you want to spend your turn micro-managing your cities or some such. How can we make the player want to engage in this mini game, and not dislike it, without taking all the focus away from the main game?
Idea 2 is an opt in method. Either the player wants to play the mini game or doesn't, and that really only changes, perhaps, how quickly research happens. The problem is that you'll want the player to engage in this mini game or all the assets you used to make it are wasted, but don't want to make it more fun than the main game.
Idea 3 is something interesting, but takes a bit of the game and makes it passive, but tech trees are pretty passive as is. The problem is that what if you want to make a good portion of your game about researching, but not all of it? What if the player has to watch some form of the research cut-scene every 5 minutes or so, how do we make each scene interesting?
I know that much of this is open ended and much is up to the designer to determine. What I'm looking for is idea's, suggestions, and experiences with similar systems. Thank you.