One thing I've found is that, due to how your troops spawn in during combat, the event "rival strike force" is currently close to impossible to defeat. The enemy spawns all of his troops simultaneously and sort of clumps up into a "big ball of death" while your troops trickle in slowly and are unable to do noticeable damage. I was unable to beat this event even with more than 4 : 1 numbers advantage.
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I agree- the rivals are overtuned and were vaguely intended as a diplomacy incentive but still need a ton of work in order for that to make any sense. The massive difference in their difficulty is likely because they have higher range than the default player soldiers, especially higher than player militia. With military stat improved and soldiers, the soldier vs infantry is only like a 5% difference in range, which sounds fine on paper but in practice it snowballs and becomes unstoppable.
underlying problem is that longer range essentially becomes 'first strike' and then the units on the winning side pile into a DPS wall (ally units also do this against some short range enemy types which is the same issue reversed, often making it too easy regardless of their other stats). I would like to allow higher attack range diversity but it probably requires higher health or some kind of unit positioning adjustment which could make the battles longer. I would be ok with longer battles but only if the battles were more intricate (leader abilities, cooldowns, tactical military decisions, etc).
Thematically none of the current invasion teams are the most dangerous, but the ravenous swarm against pollution/affinity is supposed to be pretty high on that list. There is also some possibility that making player units move faster could help, but in either case the invasions are a narrow skill expression until some form of complexity is attached, so it needs more than just the balance I think.
In an ideal situation, a person complaining 'X team is way too hard' could be told "that's a skill issue".
no amount of balancing is intended to make the game 'easy', but it isn't intended to be a brick wall either.
(random note: response doubles as my personal notepad - invasions should become a very important feature)