For 3 races, you could do a triangle selector, where clicking a corner focuses exclusively on that race, and clicking somewhere near it focuses mostly on that race. Alternatively you could just do a sorted list, or choose the most important, or have occasional audience events where an archeologist asks about priorities.

Choosing which datacrystal to focus on, I wonder if that could just make use of existing priorities? If you've prioritized weaponry, that includes archeo work. If you prioritize planetary development, then the architectural artifacts are prioritized.

Local planets vs. allied planets and new digs vs. diminishing returns could just be calculated. At some point going after an ally planet is the most efficient dig, so you do that. If you've got an archeo resource, it could just be more expensive on further out sites. Alternatively, this could require some particular level of diplomatic friendship, or be purchased at the empire level (we'll give you 10,000 credits for the right to dig on your planets for 100 years).

Enemy planets it seems like you should have to occupy first. Do you have a plunder attack, where you raid a planet but don't try to govern it? That could be enough to enable archeology. Maybe a raid gets you the resource, but uses up 3 excavations since you damage the site to extract the resources quickly.

Local planets vs. allied planets and new digs vs. diminishing returns could just be calculated. At some point going after an ally planet is the most efficient dig, so you do that. If you've got an archeo resource, it could just be more expensive on further out sites.

Yes... But I don't like it because of optimization (min-maxing) issues. Like you plan to conquer planet X eventually, there are ruins, your archeologists excavate it paying premium price in archeo points. This premium price is actually wasted since later you will get this particular planet and then could do the excavation at the normal cost. So the player starts doing some stupid & boring metagame (like: prevent discovering new ruins on enemy planets). Also, in such case discovering ruins on enemy planets, while having unexcavated ruins on your planets, means the average speed of new excavation gets lowered... In short, a lot of ugliness is here.

I have a feeling the cost in archeo points should be constant regardless of ruins location... Maybe allow only 25% of total archeo points to be spent each turn on yellow/red accessibility ruins? Or some other type of points? I don't know...

Discovering a new ruin would never reduce the excavation speed, you'd only switch to foreign worlds when that's most efficient. Either you ran out of local digs, or the local digs are all on excavation #6+ and it's cheaper to do the first iteration on an ally world.

I think any system with meaningful choices is going to have a risk of min-maxing: if 10% of the budget can be spent on red worlds, that's still a valuable resource that you don't want to spend somewhere you're about to conquer (better to spend it on a further out planet). Maybe that means downgrading the alien race on that particular planet. You can automatically make appropriate priorities, but when things like "which planet to conquer next" are in a players head, they can potentially do a better job then anything automated. Good defaults at least discourage the behavior. To eliminate min-maxing, I think you either have to give planets a constant cost (no difference if its yours or not) or excavate everywhere simultaneously.

Another choice would be to have a risk slider. Worlds close by are safe, distant enemy planets are dangerous but have higher value research. They could be more expensive, or have a probability of failure. You could still include basic ROI logic, so even though you want risky, if you've conquered a distant world it's best to just take the advanced research from there so that will always happen.

What if each of the 3 ancient races had a type of relic/artifact associated with it? ie Race A -> wapons/military stuff; Race B -> domestic/planetary growth stuff; Race C technology/science stuff. That would lead to less information being needed by the Player, as all they need to know is the race. Prioritizing the Race to do archeo stuff with would intrinsically be saying I want to excavate these kinds of relics to receive these kinds of bonuses. All they'd need to do is look at a planet and see which race inhabited it to know if they want to begin excavation.

The resource that gets used for archaeological endavours could simply be Archaeologists. Using a triangle slider as suggested by Polama sounds like a solid idea, as the Player could see where their archaeo points are being spent at a glance. The slider could auto-adjust the other two races as the other is adjusted by the Player, with the option to manually adjust all 3, as well as what planets they get assigned to? Or, all planets could have such a slider, and there's a big galactic one that represents the average across every planet. Then, it would also make sense that it's the same resource for excavating relics as it is studying them, and it seems legit that performing one task detracts from your capability to perform the other.

As for a way to simulate digs on unfriendly planets, perhaps there could a chance that some archaeologists will die during the excavation. If there wasn't a some extra incentive to do this, though, it would be strictly worse than just waiting until the planet was captured. Maybe if it's a red accessibility planet then there will always be extra relics/resources gained from a heathen shrine on the site or something

But how does the player decide on this? A separate slider for "friendly/hostile planet excavation"?

A list of known ruins that the Player could "disallow for future digs" doesn't sound like a bad idea. Maybe there could also be a prompt that comes up whenever archaeos are about to be commited to a dangerous dig like "are you sure you want to commit to this dig? There's a chance that not everyone will make it back.". And a checkbox for "Never show me this in the future", so experienced players won't have to deal with it

Is increasing the number of alien races an option? Then you could have the player make a much larger choice in "which race to pursue next?" The caveat would be that you need to explore many different ruins of the alien race to solve the puzzle of their technology: you don't understand the language, or the physiology, or history of the aliens enough to make heads or tails of what you find left on one planet.

Each choice, then, would have different rewards (militaristic races, psychic races, ...) and a different risk profile (all planets under your control, only some, none). The player can balance the tech they want with future conquest plans, although it's now a much slighter benefit: it's not (enemy planet => my planet), it's (8 planets are owned by the enemy => 7 are.)

Another option: You can split your archeologists into government sponsored and freelancers/treasure hunters. Government sponsored archeologists follow your priorities, but can only dig where you've got access rights. Treasure Hunters are completely out of your control, but can work enemy planets.

Another option: You can split your archeologists into government sponsored and freelancers/treasure hunters. Government sponsored archeologists follow your priorities, but can only dig where you've got access rights. Treasure Hunters are completely out of your control, but can work enemy planets.

Hmmm, interesting. How exaclty it could work?

Let's say you're generating 100 archeo points (AP) a turn, based on whatever mechanism that is. This is then split into, say, 60 government directed AP and 40 freelance AP. This could be directly in your control, but I think it would be fun to have it (at least partially) as part of a larger "government vs. private sector" divide: is your empire a massive bureaucratic pyramid where your orders are churned by 1,000 middle managers into a royal decree for some archeologist's assistant? Or do you tend to provide looser incentives and taxes to push behavior, but let space capitalism take care of the rest? (in game, it could be slightly less efficient but precise control vs. better resource generation but you have to deal with more randomness in what your empire produces)

For government archeology, you set your priority sliders, and the resources are allocated based on that. To avoid min-maxing, I'd suggest using the priorities to select the next task to devote 100% of AP to (it's better to finish one data crystal at a time rather than wait 30 turns and finish 10 of them all at once, so you might as well just do that to prevent the player from simulating it via sliders). The Antlarians are deprioritized, but weapon tech is a high priority and this is a level 1 excavation so the return is high...it scores 72/100. Whichever scores highest is next done.

For freelance archeology, the same 100% resource assignment to a dig or data crystal happens, but the choice is completely random. It might happen on one of your planets, or on a distant ruin in enemy space. You can now keep costs constant: the penalty of an enemy planet is simply that you have to wait for it to randomly happen outside your control. (if total randomness is too much of a penalty, you could have the freelance archeologists partially follow your sliders if they select a local ruin)

If you want to play up the chaos and danger of the Indiana Jones treasure hunters, you might add good and bad random events: they can be killed (temporary AP penalty), anger the locals (increases hostility by local alien empire) but they can also steal a relic from an alien museum (free datacrystal) or gather intelligence from the enemy world while they're there. If you balance the good and bad events, the treasure hunters aren't better or worse, they're just higher variance.