Very New Player here. On the first game that I played for more than a couple of turns, I ended up as the most powerful race (humans), aligned Good, in a galaxy with other Good races. I eventually chose the Click the Turn Button Victory option . . . otherwise known as Technological Victory. None of the other three races seemed to be bothered by our impending apotheosis. They just let it happen. So it was a little anticlimactic. Also disappointingly unspecific.
It strikes me that you could have the technological victory play out a number of ways. Like:
* Implementing your race's apotheosis could require you to build a Godhood Device on each of your colonies. Expensive, and alarming to others nearby.
* You could need to conquer or assimilate one planet of each other race, in order to grok the essence of sapient existence.
* You could need to detonate a supernova, or build a mega-gadget around a black hole, in order to get enough energy to see the project to its end.
Maybe one of these would apply per game; one would be chosen randomly at game start, and it wouldn't be apparent which until you do the preliminary research. Maybe all three options would be available; the technology victory track would split three ways, and you'd choose one.
Spinning on this: Maybe you could have a "plot token" victory condition. Scattered across the galaxy are artifacts, or planet-bound special sites, left behind by the ancients. Capturing these might give you some minor abilities, but more importantly would set your on the way to victory. In essence, you're getting a technological victory by cheating and stealing the secrets of the ancients. Maybe there could be sets of neutral, good, and evil plot tokens, with a few shared by all. Think of the wheeling and dealing that would lead to!
And finally: Research in nearly all 4X games is kind of . . . academic. You build labs or move a slider and hard-thinking researchers sit down and ponder.
In the real world, progress requires exploration as well as experimentation. I think it would be neat to have technological progress grind to a halt now and then; your science adviser would appear on screen and say that the sages are stuck.
To get things moving again, you need to send out lab ships. Some tech chains would require visits to populated worlds. Others would require visits to high-energy sites (suns, supernova, black holes, etc.). Others would require visiting biologically rich worlds, still others extreme worlds (cold / hot rocks, gas giants). In this scheme, "bonus" tiles would yield especially rich data. You could have a tech track for improving your laboratory equipment.
