If it is a combination of all 3 then you should probably expect it to take along time for an entire factions resources to get high enough to warrant an aggressive expansion. What that actually entails such as which stations, which resources and are ships included, I have no idea. Thank you for the input, I was sure it would be based on rank like the previous X games, however, 'Races expand their empire based on supply and demand', from Egosoft.
Still leave a sub and a like and all that.
If you want factions to go to war, find them in the list if you want argon to go to war with antigone then you can do the cheat to get rep to 30. get your rep to 10 with the faction, enlist do some missions. donno what that does have not tested it out. You would not have the booster faction line. If you want to do this to a faction that you have not met in game.
The numbers you can enter are decimal 0.01 and so on until 1.