I also got fairly lucky by finding a few ancient caches that contained the Way of the Ancients government type, devastator pulse technology, and death ray technology. My start was fairly mediocre overall with a shortage of good potential colonies in the cluster I started in, but once I got a little farther and researched some new colony tech it helped, and I was able to invade an independent Mortalen colony fairly early on and used them to colonize some desert planets. I started with Humans in the Age of Shadows. I'll try to take some screenshots and post some if I can remember tonight.
I got to spend a little time with the new version over the long weekend, and so far my new game is going well.
