My species is very specialized in magic, to the point where they would be unable to even function as a civilization without it.  This has the major drawback of making replacing losses in a war harder than other species because their capability for telekinesis and its many, many applications and fields takes decades if not centuries to master.  The Zedevic don't have terribly high populations either, since they take much longer to mature and don't really reproduce fast.  Such high level is needed to pilot spaceships, which means that they can't just pump out ships the way some other factions might.

It also leads to them having major tech disparities with other factions, something of which makes them rather trade reliant.