I had the event that spawns a lot of new relics recently and that brought me to the idea to make them more interesting:

1. Give the player the choice between two types of xeno archaeology modules: one line of standard modules that work like those we have at the moment and one line of modules that provide only half (or whatever percentage) of the bonuses but give every turn a small chance to unlock a tech of the area the relic improves. Even better would it be if those techs were special ones that are not otherwise researchable (and to preserve their speciality, are also not tradable), but when you have one that opens up a new branch in the research tree that you can then research normally.

2. If the player chooses so he or she can scrap a relic at once and has then a 80% chance to gain a special relic tech.

3. Insert some more techs in the xeno archaeology line that increase the chance to get a tech from a relic (that would refer to the method described under 1. and also to the chance when scraping a relic).

4. Give the player the option to exploit relics (best would be if one would be able to toggle that per relic type). That would double (or so) the bonuses provided by them, but would also carry every turn a small risk that a relic will be exhausted and disappear because of that.

And two other things that came to my mind:

5. If a planet is invaded give the invader a small chance to gather a tech of the enemy (this could also be a special relic provided tech like described above).

6. Why are there no health improving modules for starbases? In later stages of the game a starbase is barely able to defend against a single large ship. There could also be a number of scaling health modules: each module doubles the health but costs one more construction point than the previous one.

7. When at war with another race and that race asks for peace give the player some malevolent points if he or she declines and perhaps a diplomatic penalty also.