There's been a lot of anger about titans being overpowered recently, and I've been thinking of ways you could balance titans (and superweapons). Then I started thinking of the Cold War, and it struck me:

In the Cold War everyone thought that they could have a massive pile of nukes, and that this would win the game for them, but there was something stopping them: these superweapons had a tremendous economic cost, both initially and in maintenance.

This is how we can balance out titans and superweapons; possessing them might ruin your economy.

Titans draw a massive (albeit flat) maintenance cost. This could be potentially be mitigated by high tier technologies which are unique for each faction. These should possess flavours for the faction. So for example the TEC loyalists could have reduced maintenance in their own gravity wells, TEC rebel titans "plunder" the maintenance from other races when they attack them, advent titans something to do with culture (not sure what though), maybe the vasari loyalists get reduced maintenance if they place their titan as the capital (so it can strengthen them but at a risk, as they can lose their capital if they bring it into battle) and I'm not sure about the rebels.

Similarly each use of a superweapon could cost a significant amount or maybe even require a low maintenance cost even when not in use.

This would discourage use of these super-powerful assets too early or too many of them by one opponent, while still allowing desperate players to go for an all or nothing bet, say if they are getting attacked mercilessly they can build a titan to defend themselves, but at the risk of weakening themselves massively in the long-term.

This is just my two-cents, feel free to criticise, but I thought I'd just put it in there.