No effect so far, but it would be nice if we would get 1 racial point for every 1000 experience points. That earned points could be later assigned in the edit screen before the new game.
To make game tougher we could make several kick-*** ancient empires (by playing countless hours
) that have lots of points and assign them to AI control, and we would take a newborn empire. Or we could exchange empires .emp files so we can play with/against more advanced empires other people made.