Reading through the steam pinned thread "Your wish for Galciv III" Apart from a ton of great idea's being brought up, one big thing was the power difference between Drengin and other factions. They simply have far to much production and warring ability. Let copy paste my response to this, and I'll go into even more detail.
"The reason in every game, the warring faction is always the go-to way to win easily, is because the devs never focus on other things, or balancing in those terms.
Why can't non warring factions have better defenses to semi-balance out at least the speed that they get taken out. Even if they can't go head to head with the warring faction, slowing down the speed they get roflstomped would allow for what they do expertise in, to be effective.
A faction that's awesome at diplomacy for instance, it gives them time to hold out until their allied arrive to help with the war effort. The fact that their strength in diplomacy is so high, also would seem that their friends would be far more willing to put more resources and time to helping them.
On the flip side the warring faction most likely sucks at diplomacy, therefore their friends if they have any, are slower to respond, or less likely to care or help.
etc.
Factions that favor tourism, and Morale for instance can force the warring faction to keep ships on the planets they take over. Tieing up much needed ships for the war effort to keeping the population under control on planets they've taken over. While this may not result in the defender winning the war, it certainly again slows down the warring factions ability to just roflstomp them into an easy victory.
If the warring faction doesn't plan properly, they may end up having most of their fleets tied up in police duty on planets, and the ships that are out fighting end up getting over run in pure numbers as the less efficient ships and fleets of the other faction start winning battles.
Warring faction has to then pull ships from planets, and possibly have the planet flip back to the original faction..
Things like this devs seem to completely neglect in terms of balancing the power struggle between warring and non warring factions. They think throwing in a half ♥♥♥♥♥ diplomacy system automatically makes it balanced, which it doesn't."
Ultimately in the end, there's just no balance what so ever in terms of non warring factions specialties to become a weapon in and of itself. The 2 examples above being good ones. How Allied AI for instance responds to threats to you by other factions being non existant, even for the most highly diplomatic factions. Having Allies in GalCiv is just about pointless except to make sure you aren't attack on all fronts, but that alone shouldn't be the only reason you make friends. Especially for non warring factions.
Warring factions as it stands don't need to plan much in terms of who they are attacking, and this in my opinion is why I consider personally GalCiv III to be nothing special in terms of its predecessor GalCiv II, there truly is nothing new or better in III apart from some cosmetic niceties. There truly is nothing new that stands out, and these problems of GalCiv II are still going strong in III.
In pure balance factoring a warring faction should need to consider who exactly they are fighting, and what their strengths are to some degree. Attacking a highly diplomatic faction with lots of friends is probably a very bad idea. (Though atm it doesn't matter, because the AI rarely want to do anything to help friends). A Warring factions course of action should probably be to thin out the weaker factions who are allied before going straight for the grand prize.
Like-wise, putting more focus on scientific focused factions needing those rare resources more to up their science output, and even the power of their ships to some degree, would be a way for the warring faction to focus them down. While the Science focused factions can usually go head to head with a warring faction due to their extreme science output and match the tech, their production tends to be lower. Balancing this out with them needing to focus on resources, and giving their tech tree the ability to boost output of resources, coupled with the resources boosting their ships defense/damage based on how many resources they have may help them. The down fall though is if they can't or don't defend their resources properly, the warring faction if playing their cards right, destroys a few of the science factions bases, or resource nodes, and flips the table in their advantage.
There are many ways to make every non warring faction viable in a fight in their own unique way, and make the warring faction need to decide how to fight them, and what their best course of action may be. It's something many games like this simply don't factor in, and really should if they don't want to be yet another cookie cutter game.
