As long as you strongly discourage farming exploits, you'll get the realtime play down to those numbers. In the earlier alphas I did a lot of convoy raids in order to gather enough bribes and credit to influence some of the races. Evucks were really difficult, never manged to get one of their elders to flip. Burlusts, you can still game, IIRC, by killing warlords until you gather enough to pressure them into a federation. It can make them somewhat ignorable until you put in a cooldown timer on those duel missions. There isn't much else you can do with them since the Evuck blackmails are too expensive for their cost.
"I will have my Federation, even if it means depopulating your planet one burlust at a time."
It's a little bit jarring that the game will keep spawning warships for you to kill in duels, even if they have no standing army because they were on the brink of extermination for several game years.
