Incidentally, for the most part I don't have much intention of trying to balance the Thoraxians in a general sense -- those guys are fearsome and that's great. But the main thing missing from the current working copy of the game (which the design notes for the next coding sprint should largely address, though perhaps not completely) are having enough butterfly-effect style reactions of the other races to a situation that is developing like that.
That way instead of just things getting blanded out, instead there's even more (perfectly logical) crazy swings in solar power based on people getting freaked out about a race that is too powerful, etc. And similarly I also added some more things about various races getting freaked out about the federation becoming too powerful. To add to the Solar Axis Pact and Pirate Empire, I also added the Union of Independent States (which is exclusively a thoraxian, burlust, and/or acutian thing), and the Thoraxian Protectorate (which is one or more of the weaker races allying with the thoraxians if the thoraxians have 2+ planets and the federation has 4+).
My favorite bit is that a lot of those political structures are moderately unlikely to show up, and certainly won't show up every game, so there we get even more variety of how the late game plays out if some faction is about to roll another faction. I mean, it's not like realistically the rest of the solar system would just carry on with no response.
I also added in an honor response and fear response for some of the races where they deal more interestingly with war exclusively taking place between third parties, and in general the racial attitudes do a better job of leading to war, etc.
Still plenty more to do with all that sort of thing, but it's a good example of hearing about a "this happens too often" and being able to go "okay then, let's fragment that into a ton of different possible results that make the butterfly effect more of a thing." As opposed to getting out the nerf bat.
