https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showth...uides-and-help would make an extremely good general "detailed reference" link to add to the list.
As above, expansion and retreat don't work quite as you've documented - there's no automatic retreat from overfull systems, for example.
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showth...king?p=6664130 is a good summary of current best theories on expansion (there are some rare complications - how much you need to include in a summary is debatable, though). Retreat threshold is 2.5%. You can't retreat from your home system, and you also can't get a retreat Pending if there aren't at least four factions total in the system
War/Election-winning thresholds are 5%, not 15% - though sure, why not get 15% for safety
Elections take place between factions of the same "ethos", which is broader than "government type", so e.g. a Confederacy will normally have elections with a Democracy ... or a Dictatorship with a Feudal. Anarchy governments / Criminal ethos factions [1] never have elections even with each other.
Black market trading harms the influence of non-Anarchy station owners. As of relatively recently, it helps Anarchy factions in the same way that normal trading does.
Cargo and exploration data sales automatically break down per-barrel/per-system when you do them, so you get the same effect from selling a page of 50 systems as from clicking through each one in turn. Bounties/CZ bonds are really the only thing left which doesn't automatically break down this way.
On the states: an important point is that the minimum duration is the minimum if it doesn't get overridden by a higher priority state. This is a good way to get rid of things like Bust which would otherwise hang around a long time. Some of the state durations seem to have changed since that table was originally written - see
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showth...-Thinking-quot for up-to-date numbers
[1] It's unclear whether "never has elections with the same" is a property of the Anarchy government or the Criminal ethos - non-Anarchy governments with the Criminal ethos are too rare to test with, and Anarchy governments with a non-criminal ethos are unknown. You can say "Anarchies never have elections" in your guide and it will be good enough for every known case
