The races were already pretty technologically ascendant in the TLF expansion (to some extent), and if you go too far-future then it all starts seeming like magic and all problems go away. If you have solved all disease, for instance, that's actually not too fun for a game. And so on.
That said, it's a lot more futuristic than any comparable sci-fi games that I'm personally aware of, on average. There are no roads, for instance, as those are pointless. Instead you build teleporter depots to get people around, and then they just walk or take the equivalent of segues or whatever in the small local area that they get moved to.
A lot of the focus of conflict in this game isn't so much about territory control (there is plenty of territory) or military conflict (though there is that, obviously), but instead on various global things like atmospheric composition, sea levels and temperatures, and so forth. So there's quite a bit of control over the planet that these races have via various terraforming methods that they are vying against one another with. All of that is pretty much hinted at in very generic ways in TLF, because of the scale of that game, but is something that I intend to simulate much more deeply here.
Anyway, I guess the shortest possible answer is that the technological progress is more advanced where it makes the game more interesting and unique, rather than actually reducing the number of challenges players will have.
