Played my second game as the Yor, finally won an influence victory after eliminating two races. Observations and comments.
Played on a large map with random density of habitable planets - the setup gave ZERO -0- planets outside of home systems as habitable. That's why it went so long.
Everyone despised the YOR, yet were always willing to make them UP chair and UP HQ. Always voted for Galactic Peace and then went back to war asap.
The computer races were allowed to have negative treasuries, Krynn were at -6000 or so at one point -before I bought a bunch of their ships. Which is a great way to scout the home system since you can see what they see before they are hunted down. I was stopped from producing right after going negative until I could produce a positive revenue and treasury.
Once I conquered the first enemy world I never could get the Yor there to reproduce from the initial 5-7 population, even with researching the Spark techs.
They will not reproduce without queuing up an assembly project on that world, it's one og the most significant changes to SyntheticLife (default is everything else/biological unless explicitly defined syntheticLife) & part of why yor play so differently. I think your biggest problem was the abject lack of habitable planets.
Edit: MapSetupDefs.xml has
None: <HabitablePlanets>0.05</HabitablePlanets>
Rare:<HabitablePlanets>0.01</HabitablePlanets>
Uncommon 0.10, occasional 0.30
common & abundant are 0.40 & 0.60 respectively
"Rare" spawning 1/5 as many planets as "none" appears very much to be a bug even though I'm not sure what the values should be;)
Right now, starts are further apart than intended (an acknowledged bug iirc) & it appears there is some kind of overflow bug that causes galaxy size to just cap & stop given fixing the spread $& setting huge abundant stars/planets will usually make a smaller galaxy than a lower density (likely why huge is the largest we can play on atm)