On something like 7-8 playthrough in a row on hard difficulty everytime the Vodyani barely develop. At end game they always have something like 500 points with 4-5 systems max.

The settings I use for my playthrough are : Endless speed, hard, spiral 8, 8 players, minor factions hard, high number of constellations, Map size max, every other parameters of the map are normal or standard, pirates are active, score and economic victories are off.

Also I could mention that always Cravers and Riftborn are top scores on every playthrough, but that's not the real problem here. Vodyani gets like 500 score when other factions are going over 3000, I think the Vodyani IA is bugged.