[Drake]

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.