Archaeology overpowered?

[mahaniok]

I have been playing my 5th game start or so, and for the first time ever I got any artifact scavenging. But for some crazy fluke, I got just boatloads of artifacts. I think I have 4 Very Rare places, 3 Rare, 1 Uncommon, 3 Common. I end up digging out 4-5 artifacts every turn. Every unit I have already has an Assassin Android or Wasp Hive; I have several extra Automated Factories because all my towns already have one. I have 6-7 unused Freuds since no one cares about willpower.
Also, each turn I dig out about 10 machines and 5 Hi-tech items out of those scavenge sites.

This is all on Regular difficulty and having so many artifacts and machines makes my game fairly easy.

What's going on? How did it come about? Which part of planet generation is responsible for it, and how I can ensure next time a bit more reasonable frequency of artifacts?

[Maerchen]

The planetary colony settlement step is responsible, IIRC. When there is a lot of garrison forces, or medical facilities, or universities, you get those. And having megacities gives you bootloads of ruins.

Mind that in a PBEM game you would have human opponents with the same boons. In your situation I recommend colonizing and founding more zones to utilize the zone artifacts.

[Uemon]

Its also the pre war population. Higher the population, more ruins, higher the chance of yellow/white artifacts, which is whats spawning those cards.

And its funny i just wrote in another thread how ridiculously OP those things are, where if you get like a dozen automated clinics, and make new zones, youve already won the game.

This is sadly precisely why i nowdays only play on very low pre war population, having about 2-3 ruins at the game start is pretty much the goldy lock spot. I only wish i could disable guaranteed metal deposit for major AIs. This allows them to snowball ridiculously.