I think it would be interesting to add a tech map mode. It could work like this to enable compatibility across either having 9 as the cap or infinity as the cap:
Red will represent the country that has the highest level tech, and green being the country with the lowest tech level and everything else falling on a spectrum in between. This will allow a better analysis of how the map overall is developing, and considering that large gaps of technology can develop between different regions on very dense maps (putting 10k+ stars for example), it would be interesting to see how tech level can impact a region's development as you would expect a higher tech region to slowly out compete and overtake all the lower tech regions.