I do this by increasing the amount of points needed for all of the techs on the "Planetary Invasion" line. I increase the points needed to complete the research by a factor of 10 or more. This dramatically slows down the ability of races to invade and take over others. The effect is that it allows your race and others to do more tech research and build more powerful ships for better and more exciting space battles. It also allows you to actually build up your Trade and Starbases to the point where you get to use more of the cooler modules. Of course, to do this, you need to "mod" the main Tech Tree for all the races, so if you are not into "modding" the game, then this won't work for you.

IronBat1, all things being relative - there's sooooo much to mod into the tech trees that someone can certainly have incredible influence over multiple features & gameplay balance that it's all worth every darn last xml editing of other similar files too.

Political parties aside, i guess the RC is at the core of a bazillion different GC2 games. Not counting the usual incredibly variable settings.

Oh yes, the Korath. In order for my suggestion about "increasing the amount of points needed for all of the techs on the Planetary Invasion" to work, I DO have to deliberately leave the Korath out as one of the other races. I kind of hate to do that, but the Spore ships with their instant planetary takeover throw the game too much out of balance for me. Of course, the Korath have been known to FORCE me to send a fleet over to their planets and constantly have to destroy anything and everything they produce (i.e. ships, starbases, etc.). Kind of like a permanent United Nations "Peacekeeping" team permanently on station ; )

Then there are the rare situations where I have Terror Star Development (before I have Planetary Invasion), and, well, you know that the Korath System kind of looks a little like Alderaan. Hmm, we need to test the full destructive power of this fully operational battle station....