Neat ideas, thought getting fairly far afield.
However, I absolutely hate the idea of adding more ruins only tech. It's a pet peeve of mine. Like, the people who built those ruins presumably invented this without needing to find it. If they could do so, why can't we? Ancient caches of impossible to replicate technology is a staple of science fiction and fantasy, and it's just really, really, stupid.
- I never see it so much as "impossible to replicate " as, "billions of years of evolution worth of advancement" hence it's more practical because it dodges the plot hole of "why the hell didn't someone come up with this sooner?" to which the answer becomes, "because we haven't evolved into sentient, Omnipotent Furbies... yet." or some such typical "Pre-Cursor" type nonsense. Having it be ruins only would one solution, but not the only one. Just requiring mining and the sub-sequent transport, defense and so on could potentially be enough to offset any OP-edness.
I think that having ruins only tech isn't super believable personally, if you find like, the suggested matter transmuter tech in the TL3 ruined colony for example, it raises rather a lot of questions, if these guys could research it, why couldn't we? Are we to believe that when this civilization previously existed they too looted ruins and found it there? If so why weren't they higher tech level? Unless the civ they got it from also looted it, and so on and so on. It doesn't really seem plausible that that stuff would survive a collapse that destroyed multiple civilizations, let alone one.
Maybe having it have a chance to show up on worlds with an anomaly, or as something similar as a stand alone event not tied to ruins could work
- No, I'm looking at it as a situation where we find it in ruins only because we'd need to play thousands and thousands of years in-game before we could develop it ourselves. The TL3 species
may have looted it like us, they might have been a slave race of the guys who developed it, or they might just have been that much more evolved. Even in a 100% Research Game... how many times do you make it to Photonic Engines? Yet Photonic Engines are god-like and researchable, but if you wanted them it would take a long time even without a reduced research rate. What if it took the equivalent of IRL years worth of gameplay to advance your Aurora civilization that far? How many techs would need to be coded in-between? Is it not easier to say "your empire has to find this tech." or to say, "Your empire is pretty much either gonna have to find this tech or spend millions, maybe even billions or trillions, of years to develop it organically." How much easier is it to code? And who wants to read through, or play through, billions of trillions or even "mere" millions of years of evolution? Who the hell could even write believable material for such a case?
- Ruins-only stuff has always been to me stuff that would take a very, very,
very long time to develop on our own, or possibly something we never would have figured out because the methods used were completely alien to us. Perhaps requiring tooling and processes designed for eight-armed or psychic beings? The possibilities are endless.
