The game already has a couple of technologies available only from the ruins.
After reading a little discussion on Discord, I thought that the unique technology is a very good incentive to explore the ruins.
What “unique” means:
Improved version of the component (5-shoot railguns; compressed fuel storage);
Another type of component (Ground weapons);
Something new (ship/station component for Aether Gate detection/prevention; armor repair module).
At the moment, only common technologies (which is not very useful if you have a lot of labs and good scientists) and some Spoiler technologies (which looks more like a bug) can be obtained from the Ruins.
I suggest to add more technologies and give them to some Spoilers (5-shoot railguns for Precursors? Sounds fun). Such technologies cannot be researched by disassembling components.
Since you won’t necessarily get exactly these technologies when exploring, I don’t think it will affect the balance of the game too much. In the end, you can get a laser or armor/shields upgrade instead.
I believe that the opportunity to get something that is not available with independent research will attract significantly more interest in Ruins than just reducing the research time by a couple of years.
I hope this adds even more exploration, fun and “Wow, I’ve never seen this before” to the game.
I always loved the ruins side of Aurora, the slot-machine style surprise loot with the unique ruins-only techs being one of the jackpots.
Since once you get the spoiler-tech from a ruin or enemy race it becomes a permanent regular-research item, I thought a way of adding a unique reward like your “Improved Version” component without adding new spoiler techs would be finding improved/”ancient” versions of components that have the same base techs that ruins race would normally produce, but have improved stats.
For example, today you could find lets say a Beam Fire Control with Range 320,000km and Tracking Speed 16,000km that if disassembled would give you tech points towards Beam Fire Control Range 80,000km and Tracking Speed 4,000km, an “ancient” version of that component that could be found would still only have BFCR 80k and TS 4k base tech, but due to the mysterious workings of the ruin race the component you find could be lighter, cheaper, require less crew, or or have better range or tracking speed than the base technology would normally allow.
The bonus gameplay element for this would be a unique race bonus less than learning an entire new spoiler-tech, but provide more incentive for the player to design a ship variant to leverage the “ancient” component that would otherwise be impossible to design due to the innate “ancient” ruin-only bonus being applied to the base stats of the component. Players could still disassemble “ancient” components but would only get benefits to the same base-techs as the non-ancient version.
Of course for things like like fire controls as empire tech advances “ancient” components with outdated tech may become more obsolete, but there could still be gameplay or RP reasons where smaller or cheaper components could still be of use. Could also make the “ancient” bonus be a wider range to give a chance for something 50% or 75% better vs. a smaller bonus, although this would increase the number of component designs to be tracked in the database beyond what a single possible “ancient” bonus would add.
I’d rather see the remaining ruins only techs removed. It makes no sense that Precursors or Ancients were able to develop something that the player cannot develop, considering that the tech tree goes really far and deep into ‘future tech’, so to speak.
Well Ancients were able to build the Constructs, which we are not able to build. So it does not seems that strange to me, that they had other aces in their sleeve as well.
We could limit these techs to only spawn from Ancient ruins or possibly from Ancient wrecks or derelicts. Although I am not sure if Ancient warships even exist in Aurora.
With the upcoming ability to manually connect systems in spacemaster mode, I’ve been considering filling a disconnected system full of a certain type of consuming spoiler race. Then when I fully explore a ruin rolling a dice to see if I trigger an “event” the awakening of a dormant stargate in the system.
I know it’s not too different to something that can trigger now with ruins but I’m thinking more stellaris end gam crisis sorta thing.
I suppose Ancients technologies will require about 1000+ years of research, which they did instead of creating an invincible fleet or something like that. It’s too long for a normal game session.
