One of the things I love the best, about Endless Legend, is the simple act of exploring ruins. It makes me feel just a little bit like an alien version of Indiana Jones, and it really sparks my imagination, and inspires me to "fill in the blanks" about what the true history of Auriga might have been.

But, where so many aspects of the game seem very fresh and exotic, and very different from the Civilization series, looting ruins is harmed by being too reminiscent of encountering independent tribes, Quests and artifacts are great, but they feel like they're tacked on to what's basically the same old Civ mechanic, and retaining the same old, un-fun, "randon chance" irritations, that just slow down my game.

I find it really frustrating, when I spend the time to reach and loot an untouched ruin, and just don't come up with anything at all. That disappointment doesn't really add anything to the game, for me anyway, and it only encourages save-scumming, which, if I choose to indulge in that--aside from making me feel like I'm "cheating", just ends up wasting the free time I've set aside, to play this game. If I instead let it slide, I've just wasted a turn, or more, that I could have instead spent, doing something exciting and cool.

Along with this, I'd also really love to see quests have unlimited turns, and instead, allow any nation to potentially grab the resources or artifacts for themselves, in a "winner-take-all" race. That would be exciting and fun!

There's NOTHING more frustrating, than spending 5 turns going out of my way to reach a ruin, only to discover that it was never actually reachable in time--or that it's even across the OCEAN--on the very last turn!

I'd love to see every ruin on the map have some kind of treasure in it. I don't think that would do anything to harm the balance of the game, since every nation would be equally competing to loot them first; and. since it would help to alleviate the desire to save-scumm, it might even improve balance.

Furthermore, I think it would be very interesting if more were done with them, over time, as new eras occurred, and new technologies were researched. More reasons to guard ruins in your territory, from outside pillaging, and also, if each ruin could be assigned some little background story to it, that could be delved into and explored, that could do a LOT to increase the fun of immersion into the lore of the game's history and Universe.  

Maybe also have new ruins be uncovered, as new eras and techs are reached?

Ruins could also hold dangers, along with their treasures. For example: I'd love to see brand new minor factions just pop up out of the ground, as a result of my "delving too deep", and this could be a fantastic way to tie 'Dungeon of the Endless' into 'Endless Legend'. Who knows what lost experiments of the Endless might still be held in stasis, underground?

Instead of the risk of there being nothing to loot, how about the risk of releasing serious new threats?

Not just cool new minor factions to interact with, but things like an army of hostile robots, or a plague of mysterious shadow-entities, or have a brand-new major faction just show up, in the middle of the game (this could maybe be done relatively easily, by just reskinning the old ones? if making new ones was too much trouble to go through), or have some rampaging Kaiju-sized MONSTERS show up! Or, new enemy heroes that would join the nearest independent minor faction, build an actual city of Jotuses or Eyeless or Rumblers, or whatever, and start developing them into a brand-new rival "minor nation"!

In fact, I think it could be awesome, if each ruin acted something like a dungeon, where, each ruin would have a random number of levels. You would need to dedicate a hero to exploring deeper than the very first level of each ruin. it would then take more time--and also cost Dust--to explore deeper levels of that ruin.

Some levels might require special "keys" to unlock them--like, you would need a certain (random) technology, or 5 of a certain resource, or your hero would have to be wearing a certain artifact (one that could just be built, though, for balance and fairness) and then, the deeper you chose to explore, the more risk you would be taking of bad things happening, but, you'd also have a chance of finding treasure, too.

Good or bad, though, you'd never just end up with nothing--and, I'd HAPPILY PAY for a DLC that did these kinds of things!

What DLC have you tried? Playing as Allayi (from shifters) with inferno active was quite a trip with the ruins looting. Allayi collect pearls that get scattered about every winter, so they need to constantly have roaming units, and ruins are often on the way to wherever you're going. The dust storms from inferno make all that really worth too, they add an extra search to random ruins around the map, I think like 60% of them or something like that, and you also have extra movement during the storms to reach them (the storms last like 5 turns or so). I found tons of quest gear. No changes as extravagant as you suggest, but it was quite fun and a different take on the game.

The thing that bothers me most about quest gear from ruins is you still need the resources to afford it. "I found a sword!" "No I found a way to make a sword if only I had adamantium" is quite the let down.

Best advice I can give for your enjoyment of the game is play on a difficulty that you don't have to save scum. This game's loading time is really long so whatever experience you have with the game is going to be really choked out if you try to play that way. I understand save scumming, I have something like 1300 hours between the two Xcom games and I'm a total scumbag while playing Xcom, but the amount of benefit you get from RNG rerolls in Endless Legend is very little compared to the amount of time it takes to reload (whereas in Xcom one accident can cascade into decide your campaign). Making RNG systems in games work in your favor is about aggregate of many choices. Don't worry about the few empty ruins, just loot lots of them.