Space 4X where you are the Emperor (grand feel, no micro). I'm thinking how to handle exploration of ancient ruins.

You have planets, these have ancient ruins. Each turn you get excavation/archeo points based on how many ruins you control (ignore the details, the point is you have those archeo points which represents how much your archeologists excavated recently).

Then goes the meat. Since I don't want the "oh you discovered 2 ruins and each gave you +5 research points" which is non grand and does not fit the game I thought of handling it via audience. Every X turns there is an audience organized with people coming in with various issues. One of them would be an archeologist. Before the audience there is an archeo roll made (based on archeo points you collected) which determines if there was a major discovery and if yes what it was (afterwards the archeo points are reset - used up). So the archeo points are in fact consumed by the "generate me an archeology event". This means the number of archeo dicoveries in each game is pretty constant (max 1 per audience) but the quality of the discovery depends on how many ruins you secured.

Example archeo events:

* You discovered a new technology, bunch of research points, a new hull, a new weapon

* You discovered a strange device and are asked which research institute/mad scientist should get it. Then, during the next audience, you get a result based on your choice (the first institute would turn it into an energy source while the other would make a weapon out of it).

* You uncovered a part of a secret (1/5 for example), you have a decent chance a next part of such secret will be revealed in future events (like 33% that a next archeo event will be a secret). Once all 5 parts of a secret are revealed you get a bonus (weapon, tech, etc). In addition you should have some sort of funding option (spend 100 money for a higher chance to discover next such secret, so you could control how fast you want to discover it all, or maybe ignore it and do not pursue).

Questions:

1) What do you think overall, should I implement it?

2) Any comments/counter ideas for the mechanic?

3) I'm looking for archeo events! If you have one, post.