ancient ruins suck

Ancient ruins on Giant World Map are not balanced (especially on marathon game speed).

If you play Japan, UK or another Island Power, You will probably miss most ruins because (in most cases) you first have to research watering before being able to leave your starting island.

If you start in North America or Russia / Siberia or Africa (alone), your scouts may find dozens of ruins granting you a few technologies, social policies, maybe even a religious belief.

If I play as Island Power, I consider turning ruins off.
 
I recently played an Emperor Huge Pangaea Marathon game that ended up being two distinct continents. ALL ten civs appeared on the Western continent. I managed to get to the Eastern continent first (by a VERY large margin). I sent over 5 Scouts to search out the ruins. I literally managed to scoop up @ 100 ruins, all to myself. Just to be perverse, I did the Save. Explore. See if the result was worth keeping (NO MAPS!), and if not, Load sequence _Some_ techs. (About 6 I think.) Culture. Faith. The occasional new population unit. Money. (Only as a desperation/boredom compromise.) I would reload 10-20 times per ruin to get that "something worthwhile". By the time I had entirely cleared that Eastern continent, the most upgraded Scout I had was a Composite Bowman.
 
What bonuses a ruin gives are entirely dependent on the turn they're picked up (unless you're Shoshone), not pre-coded into generation or dependent on when they're discovered. They might also depend on what unit picks them up (definitely depends on whether that unit has been upgraded via ruin before). For example, a ruin on turn 2 ALWAYS gives a spearman upgrade to a warrior, but if a warrior who's been already turned into a spearman picks it up it will give anything BUT an upgrade.

So if you really feel like cheating and are OK with semi-exploits, camp next to a ruin and keep reloading/picking it up in different turns until you get a result you deem desirable.
 
Undefeatable said:
What bonuses a ruin gives are entirely dependent on the turn they're picked up (unless you're Shoshone), not pre-coded into generation or dependent on when they're discovered. They might also depend on what unit picks them up (definitely depends on whether that unit has been upgraded via ruin before). For example, a ruin on turn 2 ALWAYS gives a spearman upgrade to a warrior, but if a warrior who's been already turned into a spearman picks it up it will give anything BUT an upgrade.

So if you really feel like cheating and are OK with semi-exploits, camp next to a ruin and keep reloading/picking it up in different turns until you get a result you deem desirable.
Click to expand...

That hadn't been my experience but I haven't used ruins in quite a while. My experience was if I enter a ruin and don't like the result, I can reload the save and do something else that uses a random number (such as attack a barb camp with a different unit) then return to original unit and for a different ruin result... I'd have expected selecting the option which disabled having a fixed Random Number Seed and reloading would have produced a similar result.
 
Ancient ruins suck in the sense that they give success to some civilizations who find them. This is another case of having a favorable location (i.e being Shoshone with 3 ancient ruins around your capital) or not having a favorable location (scouted but found no ruins at all).
 
Undefeatable said:
... or dependent on when they're discovered.
Click to expand...
Not from what I could deduce. I was using the Reseed the RNG option, so reLoading should have given you the full spectrum of possibilities, modified by what results you got on 3-4 previous ruins. As for tech, the ONLY ones you can get are from the Ancient Era. Once you have all those, no more tech results. I did have a couple instances where a unit was Upgraded twice in a row, but in between 4 or 5 other Scouts had investigated ruins. Faith rewards don't start until after about Turn 20. And once I hit the Medieval Era, the ONLY things I got were maps or money.
 
As far As I know, ruin bonuses are defined by what difficulty you play on. The higher the difficulty, the less good the result can be.
 
Still, it remains that ruin results depend partially on what turn they're picked up. The only other factors other have mentioned are which unit gets it and which era.

Also, upgrade ruins are always available. I once got a machine gun in the industrial with this.
 
Undefeatable said:
Also, upgrade ruins are always available.
Click to expand...
My Shoshone Pathfinders beg to differ. (They get to pick from whatever choices are available.) Unit upgrades are intermittent at best. (I believe that the availability is modified by how many ruins ago you last saw a unit upgrade choice.)
 
CaptainPatch said:
I imagine it was a progression of already-previously-upgraded units that kept on getting upgraded. [Save. Investigate ruin. See what results. If not weapons upgrade, Quit. Load. Investigate ruin. Repeat as necessary.]
Click to expand...

Units previously upgraded via huts can't be upgraded via huts again.
 
CaptainPatch said:
My Shoshone Pathfinders beg to differ. (They get to pick from whatever choices are available.) Unit upgrades are intermittent at best. (I believe that the availability is modified by how many ruins ago you last saw a unit upgrade choice.)
Click to expand...

This is correct. There must be minimum of 2 Ancient Ruins in between the same "kind" of Ancient Ruin benefits.

Here is the unit upgrade chart. Lancer or hakkapeliipita can be upgraded to anti-tank, given that the unit was not previously upgraded via ancient ruin. Gatling gun will be upgraded to a machine gun. But during these eras, it's usually difficult to find undiscovered ancient ruins.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/T7CfG.png

Also difficulty levels do not affect your ancient ruin finds, except in the settler mode. In settler mode, you can find workers or settlers in the ruin.
 
The fact a unit can't be upgraded more than once is definitely a change... as to when I couldn't say since I stopped using ruins in unmodded games before G&K because the unit upgrades and free tech were so unbalancing on Marathon.
 
neoaspilet11 said:
well why most ancient ruins gave me useless bunos? in my last game immortal, i got 3 map bonus 2 which i already explored, 2 technologies when i am about to finish both pottery and writing and last babarian camps. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
Why? Because you are not playing Shoshone.

Try it. You'll love it. :p
 
YourHarry said:
Units previously upgraded via huts can't be upgraded via huts again.
Click to expand...
Are you certain about that? I was quite sure that I had some Scouts that made it all the way up to Crossbows without ever having returned to my own territory (which is the only place where a unit can be manually Upgraded). [I play on Huge maps, so it takes practically forever to march a unit all the way back to friendly territory.]
 
CaptainPatch said:
Are you certain about that? I was quite sure that I had some Scouts that made it all the way up to Crossbows without ever having returned to my own territory (which is the only place where a unit can be manually Upgraded). [I play on Huge maps, so it takes practically forever to march a unit all the way back to friendly territory.]
Click to expand...

So, you can test this with Shoshone. Pathfinder shows you all possible choices that a hut can give. Upgraded pathfinders (composite bows) also retain this ability and you will see that they can't be further upgraded, regardless of how many huts they subsequently find. But like one poster said, this change could have been relatively recent - like 6 months ago?
 
YourHarry said:
.... Upgraded pathfinders (composite bows)
Click to expand...
I have been inclined to believe that was a specific tradeoff of having Pathfinders: By skipping the Archer upgrade, the _Pathfinder_ is allowed only the one upgrade. Other units may/probably do have the ability to receive multiple upgrades. At least, that's what it seems like to me.
 
I guess u get a lot of bad ruins when playing against the AI, but in multiplayer somebody has to get the good ones ;)

else there is always the Shoshone: a Pathfinder able to choose ruins, and if u save them, u can do that throughout the game. Besides, upgrading them is a good long term investment so they don't go dying on you. And if u get the sight bonus' you'll end up with some crossbowmen or even mec. Infantry able to look 4 tiles ahead.
 
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