Ruins Tech

[inigma]

I can't seem to find a list of ruins technology and what they do, anywhere. Does anyone have a list of ruins tech?

[douglas]

In stock, there are four ruins techs. They are:

1. Massive Planetary Shielding: gives the Massive Planetary Shield Generator, a facility that gives 5000 non-phased shield points. Generally considered far too weak to be worth a facility slot, especially when compared to heavily shielded weapon platforms, and does not block Phased Polaron Beams or shield skipping weapons.

2. Massive Shield Depleting Weapons: gives the Massive Shield Depleter, a one-shot-per-battle weapon that does 1000 points of shields-only damage and takes 100 kt of space. Generally considered inferior to normal shield depleters.

3. Massive Engine Destroying Weapons: gives the Massive Ionic Disperser, a one-shot-per-battle weapon that does 500 engines-only damage and takes 100 kt of space. Generally considered inferior to normal ionic dispersers, especially considering that anything beyond 120 damage of this type in one shot is worthless once the target's shields are down, and it's usually shot in the first volley where it usually acts as just a weaker version of the shield depleter.

4. Neural Computer Interface: gives the Neural Combat Net, which is supposed to give any ship that has it the benefits of having the same experience as the most experienced friendly ship in the same battle. If it actually worked, this would be extremely useful. Unfortunately, it doesn't. You'd be better off spending less resources on a fighter bay and never putting any fighters in it.

Which ruins gives which of these techs is determined at map generation.

Ancient Ruins can also give a number of randomly selected normal techs (1-3 in random stock maps). These techs are randomly selected at the time you colonize the planet out of all the techs you have the prerequisites for.

You can tell something about what you're going to get by the description of the ancient ruins on the planet:

1. "There are ancient ruins on this planet from a long dead civilization.": 1 random tech
2. "There are buried alien cities on this planet that have long been deserted.": 2 random techs
3. "Sensors indicate some kind of advanced technological devices left on this planet.": 3 random techs
4. "We have detected advanced technology present on this planet.": one of the ruins-only techs

Mods can change any or all of the details presented above, except the time of selection of techs.

[Fyron]

douglas said:
You can tell something about what you're going to get by the description of the ancient ruins on the planet...

Which is quite unfortunate. FQM fixes this short-sightedness.

[Kamog]

Hopefully, in SEV there'll be more unique ruins techs which are superior to the regular technologies?

[Makinus]

One cool idea would be to Ruins to give weak versions of Racial Techs...


There is any mod that does this?

[bearclaw]

Makinus said:
One cool idea would be to Ruins to give weak versions of Racial Techs...


There is any mod that does this?

As a matter of fact there is! My Dark Nova 4 mod has several of these. I've also expanded the tech trees for all unique techs so that you get a minimum of 3 levels of research out of each tech. IIRC the 'stock' unique techs have 5 levels and all the racial types have 3... All together I belive I've got 94 possible unique components/facilites. I've also got some ideas to add more to this. Which I think I'll do before the next DN4 game starts on PBW, which will be shortly as the game itself is on PBW now Dark Nova 4 II.

[Fyron]

Makinus said:
There is any mod that does this?

There is a Unique Techs mod floating about for SE4 Classic that adds a bunch of ruins techs, some of which are weaker versions of racial items.

[douglas]

Ok, so the Neural Combat Net isn't completely useless, but it's far from as useful as it would be if it worked as advertised.

[douglas]

Retrofitting does not change ID. This is just one of the many things I tested concerning ship ID back when I discovered it.

Thank you, Q, I hadn't thought of that particular possibility for why we were getting conflicting reports.

Edit: A quick test with your .gam file shows that it seems to work as you stated for the offensive bonus of experience, but the defensive bonus isn't shared at all.

[Ragnarok-X]

douglas said:


4. Neural Computer Interface: gives the Neural Combat Net, which is supposed to give any ship that has it the benefits of having the same experience as the most experienced friendly ship in the same battle.


If it actually worked, this would be extremely useful. Unfortunately, it doesn't. You'd be better off spending less resources on a fighter bay and never putting any fighters in it.

WTF, the neural net is NOT working ? I recently has an event boosting one of my vessels to 40% experience and i have all my ships with neurals nets. Can anyone confirm that it does not work ?