Ruins

Discovering new technologies could refer to new tech areas, or simply to new levels in current tech areas. Make sure you check through your news log for any entries you didn't see at the beginning of the turn, they should be what you received.

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In your news log it just shows like you have invented a new technology, like you would invent one of your own...

~Myrath

Based on some fiddling around with reloads in a test game (1.33), there appear to be two sorts of ruins.

One type gives you a boost to a randomly selected tech that you have already unlocked; so far in 1.33 it seems to only boost one tech per ruin colonized, and to boost it exactly one tech level regardless of cost (leaving any accumulated points still accumulated toward the next level). The random selection is done at the moment you colonize the ruins; if you use a move order to put your colonizer orbiting the planet with ruins and then save the game, each time you reload and hit colonize you'll get a different tech randomly picked. Since it increases by a single tech level regardless of cost, it's obviously more useful if it randomly picks an expensive and useful tech, and less so if it randomly picks a cheap and/or useless tech.

The other type is connected with the "special" techs, such as Massive Planetary Shield Generators, Neural Nets, etc. I've not tested enough to be sure, but it seems that what special tech is on this type of ruin may be picked when the map is created; and that there are probably multiple ruins for each of the special tech. If you don't have the special tech in question yet, colonizing will unlock it. (Once you have the special technology unlocked, you still have to research into it to get any benefits / new stuff.) If you already have the special tech a ruin is supposed to grant, it seems that you get the "you found new technology" message, but don't actually get anything.

My guess is that this is probably what happened; if you've gotten any of the special techs already in that game, the ruin that gave you nothing was a "repeat" ruin. Colonizing these repeat ruins still has some small utility, as it prevents some other player from possibly getting the tech if they didn't have it.

My understanding of the map generation code is in agreement with your conclusions. The type of ruins is determined at the time the map is created. For ruins which yield "special" technologies, the tech area is predetermined. For the other type of ruins, only the number of techs to increase is predetermined; the actual tech area(s) are random.

I've had it a couple times that I would colonize a ruins planet and not recieve any new techs. I play version 1.33 with IRM.99b. less than 40 turns in so there is alot of research to go.