[Shadowstar]

In my Solar vicinity map, I made some custom ruins on planets. Of course, with the map editor you can create your own text descriptions for things, so I played around with that. Adding more to the game sounds like fun if possible and I'd love to do it if someone can tell me how.

Mixed components is an interesting idea. The only time I've ever seen that in a 4x game is in Stars! The Mystery Trader would give mixed components or ships loaded out with mixed components. They were "artifacts". One was a shield/cloaker/armor/scanner combo I believe. There were plenty more. My favorite would have to be the Enigma Pulsar engine. Great for making fighters. Could it be done in SEIV? I think so. I looked at the component editor and it seems like it would be possible. I'd probably design it to be like an artifact.

There's an interesting idea: have one tech field that's reserved for artifacts. It can't be researched, but you can group together all kinds of crazy components into that field and let people find them. Perhaps there could be one super rare artifact that you could find that would open up that field for research, like some kind of ancient alien data crystal that has all of the technological information for an ancient, all-powerful alien race that mysteriously dissapeared eons ago. Researching that field would simulate scientists attempting to decode the information from the crystal. You'd get some cool new gadget every now and then. Course, it would have to be expensive and the artifact that would let you do that kind of research would have to be pretty rare. A gamemaster could even design an entire PBW or PBEM game around it; the goal being to find the planet the crystal is on and maintain control of it for a certain number of turns.

Ahhh... sorry about the run-on folks.