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- Space Empires: IV & V (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=20)

- - Ruins? (http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=2135)

Is there a way to get to the ruins and advanced technology on some planets if you are unable to colonize them?

Nope. You will have to wait until you can colonize the planet.

Ruins in SEIV annoy me, they always are good things so theres no risk involved in investigating them. I keep waiting for a message such as "Your colonists have contracted a level five plague from dead bodies in a ruined city on hexax IV", or maybe instead of technology they could give me a ship "Sire we've discovered a working starship in the ruins on helious III!", make it more interesting.

"You have awakened a Class 2 PerVersion. It is expected to rapidly consume and corrupt nearby civilizations over the next ten years."

Ouch. ;-)

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

I like it! http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif

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Spyder, Chairman of the Arachnid Consortium

How about "Barbaric Natives on Helius II have captured your colonists and used them to rebuild their fallen technological civilization" LOL

Here's an interesting one for all y'all:

Here it is, turn 204 (!) and I found a planet with ruins on it (in a dead-end system that used to be AI territory). Now, the Last four or five ruins I've found gave no advancements at all (fortunately, the first 4 or 5 ruins I found DID give me techs, three of the unique techs and then some random techs). Anyway, I colonized the world with the ruins, expecting to get nothing for my trouble except another colony in a new system. Imagine my surprise when I got:

Cloaking level 3
Minerals Extraction level 6
Mines level 5

(obviously, I'd researched the previous levels of each one).

Happens to me all the time. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon9.gif

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"We've made too many compromises already, too many retreats! They invade our space and we fall back -- they assimilate entire worlds and we fall back! Not again! The line must be drawn here -- this far, no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!" -- Patric Stewart as Captain Picard
UCP/TCO Ship Yards

From my understanding on how ruins work based purely on observation, there are two types of ruins: ones that give you unique technology that you can't research (advanced technology present), or ones that increase one or more levels of your current tech (various others).

The unique ruins appear to be fixed at game creation, so if you have the specific tech the planet would give you, you don't get a benefit.

The non-unique ruins give a (somewhat?) random increase to your tech levels. I'm not sure how it picks which levels to increase, but a save-and-reload test did produce some slight variation on what I got from the planet. The fact that I didn't get a lot of variation (ie, I got the same set of increases much of the time) leads me to believe that either that there is a small list of potential tech I could get from those planets, OR it's based off some random number generator taking game information as a seed, and when I got the same set of tech through several reloads, I wasn't changing the seed value.

Anyone know for sure how the non-unique ruins works? I'm curious if anyone else has some other possible theories, or hacked into the executable to figure out exactly what the game is up to in that regard.

My understanding is that the non-unique ruins give you a one level boost to the tech (if you know it). So if you have Cloaking level 2 then you get level 3. If you have level 4 already, you get level 5. And you never get more than a one level increase.

This is just my memory of a post from quite a long time ago so I could be wrong. Can anyone confirm this?