If the cheese is to just release sectors and reintegrate them, then it should be population maintenance costs which grow quadratically so that in the long run, you can't maintain all these newly integrated subjects. Or, have no empire-wide malus of growth or maintenance, but use the shiny, new espionage feature and make larger empires quadratically more fragile than smaller ones so that giant blobs can be beat in another way than through sheer military-economic power (Xploitation.. the neglected middle X)
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