Ruin Exploitation

[ShadoCat]

I like ruins the way they are now. They add interest to a campaign.

Ditto.

Though I'd be OK with the tech variant as well.

[sloanjh]

Here's an interesting twist that I don't know what to do about.  I recently captured two Precursor sensor bases by ground assault.  Their strength instantly dropped to be that of my sensor bases.  This is the flip side of the auto-upgrade feature for the econony etc - when efficiency techs are researched, you put your factories, sensor bases, etc under your pillow and when you wake up in the morning, voila - the upgrade fairy has come along and made them all more efficient.  (Coded up as a single efficiency in the DB.)  What hadn't occurred to me is that the same thing happens when you reactivate/capture opposing tech - it's magically transformed to your efficiency level.

The reason I don't know what to do about it is that the obvious solution, to have each installation know its efficiency is yuckky in three ways:

1)  A lot of disgusting micro-management (and cost) to upgrade the entire industrial base when efficiency increases.

2)  A lot of disgusting coding that Steve would have to do to track individual efficiencies.

3)  (I suspect) a major bloat in the size of the DB for the added information.

Now that I think of it, the memory bloat probably wouldn't be that bad, since it could be coded up as "8 factories of TL 4, 6 of TL 5, ...".  The major nastiness is figuring out upgrade mechanisms that don't entail micro-management.

OTOH, it would have been really cool to have those sensor bases able to see 10x as far as mine do (judging from where they were picking my ships up) and to haul them home for dissection in an attempt to up my TL.

John

[Paul M (OP)]

My point is pretty much for multiplayer, in this case the first person to find a ruin can get such a boost from it that it is difficult to balance for the SM beyond basically removing the ruins or adding them into the game for the other players.  While both are doable work arounds reducing the ruins effectiveness would allow them to show up, and I like the rest of you think they do add interest and are a good idea; but without making them balance destroying.

Not that there is any chance of true balance given the existance of survey luck but this is the case of survey luck squared.  

50-100 pts towards the appropriate technology (2-5 pts per infrastructure) and the ability to unlock advanced technology seems good enough to me without directly giving technology or items to the player.