I want my magic to be that Stirk gets no magic.
On exploration opportunities, I'm not sure I have any great ideas. Just to state the obvious, small bonuses like a bonus to researching certain tech or some resources (luxury or even just a bit of food or an animal or maybe a bonus labor that we don't have to feed for a turn) make sense for your every day exploration stuff. Resources that we can later learn how to exploit and might be a source of tension between players might be of interest, which can be things like resources needed to upkeep rarer units in later ages, or a better site for a outpost.
Some refuges that can be taken in to increase pop by a few hundred could be a thing (maybe a temporary moral negative for rarer races or something).
Moral choices, perhaps travelers in need of help, either with a risky military intervention vs monsters or raiders needed or needing food or other resources. Help them, maybe increases relationship with npc towns later on, maybe does nothing. Or could steal from them for the opposite of that.
Perhaps a few things scattered around could give us a extra technology in the next age (or this one if appropriate).
For technology, supporting larger populations is the most obvious one, I think. I'm not sure really, how close we are, maybe some military technology if we might start fighting. Metal working, obviously... I'm not sure if the idea for food is to make it continually more efficient as ages go or keep it so that around 50% of the population needs to work in food. If it's made more efficient by the addition of higher tier food gathering or processing technologies I think we might eventually need a labor sink, perhaps related to moral or research. It's hard to make suggestions on this specifically I think because it's hard to get the "vibe" of how the economy is suppose to work, right now it's pretty simple, and I'm not sure if it's suppose to get more complicated and decisiony or just stay how it is. Game might get too hard to run and play with too much complications, but also making choices can be fun too.
The ability to recruit more leaders would make sense eventually.
A more serious answer to what I want from my magic... I guess I've not really thought about that. I guess I view it as sorta like a cross between holy magic and a bit of fire magic? More upgrades for the flower society based on their temple or buildings like the solar condenser would be cool. Other things that come to mind, although maybe not all would make sense at the next tech level, would be stuff like a some heals, banishing evil, maybe some buffs for flower paladins, and maybe fire damage... A more specific thing I'd want to see eventually is resistance to fire and/or cold, might make sense as some "inner radiance" where the warming power of the Sun holds off the cold and makes flowers more resistant to heat as they become partially solar beings?