[PvK]

What value would lowering the max have?

I think it's neat to be able to theoretically spend 9500 points on combat abilities. More importantly, having a very high maximum expenditure gives more room for trade-offs in empire design, and less incentive to "go for the max".

Moreover, the design goal for the mod was to correct balance simply by changing empire point costs, without changing what the things actually do.

PvK