The gang bang on the Awakened Empire prior to the War in heaven is a huge let down, you will lose a lot of viewers now, it was the one thing we all wanted to watch. Not in the spirit of the game. If WIZ was here he would blow his stack at you guys. While it is smart play, its a bit cheesy. A huge disappointment for the audience. I hope WIZ makes the crisis X 10 to crush you guys as punishment.
However what this highlights to all you Devs is just how easy an Awakened Empire can be defeated. I have seen it time and time again with the AI, huge Federations just roll over them. Rarely is an Awakened Empire a problem, why it always fires too late in the game.
Return the triggers for Fallen Empires to awakened based on fleet strength and certain techs being researched. Once Empires start hitting 50k, 70-80k fleets a fallen empire should be waking up. If one empire has 50k a Federation could easily field 250k fleets, which makes fighting the Awakened Empire easy if they send just one fleet.
Another option is increase there fleet power, fleet size to make it more of a challenge. Should be a start option as to how powerful you want to make Awakened Empires. To easy to snipe 1 or 2 Awakened Empire fleets, then they are easy. If the fleets were more powerful it would be a lot more strategic in how you go about it.
The main issue is though by improving the AI, playing on Grand Admiral or Admiral the AI fields massive fleets by 200 years in, mostly better then the Devs, sorry but the AI gets a lot more advantages. The Awakened empires need to tier up so there fleets are more powerful if playing on a higher difficulty level otherwise the AI's crush them.
Awakened Empires, turn into a fizer and War in Heaven can be a non-event.
Similar for the Khan if it fires 120 years into the game the Khan doesn't last too long. Khan needs to fire right around the 100 year mark other wise its a non event as well on the high difficulty levels. If this tiered up as well with the higher difficulty levels it would be so much more of a challenge.
I use mods to so the Fallen Empires wake up earlier with more realistic triggers. This should be hardcoded. Difficulty of Khan, Awakened Empires should tier with difficulty levels otherwise the advantages the AI Empires get is to much and it turns into a non-event most games.