More Realistic Ruins

[Suicide Junkie]

It never really made sense to me that a starship passing by a system would detect ancient ruins on any planet that has them. Wouldn't it have to do special scans? Well, here's an idea in two parts - the first part can be implemented without the second.

Well, considering that the first ship who passes through the system takes a detailed tally of the mineral, organic, and rads value of each planet, and rates it on how nice it would be to life there... Its not too unreasonable that super-advanced technology still intact enough to be useful to the scientists could be seen from space.

[capnq]

it might be fun to play a small map with 2 to 4 humans with lots of Ruins. Sorta a Treasure Hunt.

Puke's Junkyard Mod {link} is like that.

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
Well, considering that the first ship who passes through the system takes a detailed tally of the mineral, organic, and rads value of each planet, and rates it on how nice it would be to life there... Its not too unreasonable that super-advanced technology still intact enough to be useful to the scientists could be seen from space.

Good point

[Taera]

I think that the Ancient Ruins feature should be completely redone. Techs should be more exotic, more useful and less powerful than they are with a rare "conventional" tech.
How about this: break all ruin techs into level1, level2 and level3 to research which you'd have to research appropiate Archeology research project?
I think that multiple tech-field requiements do work in SEIV.

EDIT: edited to make more sense

[ November 23, 2002, 06:14: Message edited by: Taera ]

[Arkcon]

Originally posted by Taera:
How about this: break all ruin techs into level1, level2 and level3 to research which you'd have to research appropiate Archeology research project?
I think that multiple tech-field requiements do work in SEIV.

EDIT: edited to make more sense

A very good idea, require that you have an Archeology Theoretical Reasearch before you got ruins tech is a good idea. The AI could be hard coded to only research that tech if it saw ruins it could reach quickly.

Under the heading of random ideas, how about getting ruins tech some way other than colonizing. Say if your ship had some sensors (perhaps researched under Applied Archeology I), and stayed in orbit and got the tech over a time period of 5 turns or so. The ruins would remain, and someone else could get them -- unless you colonized, then they'd still be lost.

Instead of rushing to and maybe fighting over ruins, we would always be fighting over ruins

[ November 23, 2002, 13:09: Message edited by: Arkcon ]

[Taera]

it would be interesting that whoever controls the ruins controls the tech. You lose the planet, you lose the tech. And they gain it.
Interesting.
In this case it should be unique tech only.

[KirbyEF]

What about planet based "artifacts". You control the planet you have that ablity or special facility (ancient weapon, processing plant, gateway, research points bonus, etc.).

What about negative effects (find a reactor that makes the sun in the system goes supernova, a plague outbreak, turns the system into a nebula/storm etc.). You can stop most of these negative ruins by applying research to stop the bad effect.

Maybe when you find a ruins you find an ancient race that is upset that you woke them up or distrubed them. That race should be a Non-Player race that will attack anyone, but of course the race that finds it will probably be closest.

KirbyEF