Templars steamroll? they die in the first 5 minutes almost every time unless i go out of my way to save them. being hostile to everything off the bat is pretty much a death sentence.
Have you played the latest release? He gave them something like a flat 25% calculation bonus, so now templar fleets wreck everything. It's OK though, I don't mind having my galaxy slowly taken over by templars. It gives me a time challenge that I have to build up a templar-crushing fleet before I run out of friendly planets to trade with, and taking back the galaxy from templars is much more fun then, say, luddites. If I decide it's too much I'll probably just disable templars, maybe re-enable them further down the line with the "respawn factions" option on.
As far as request-a-fleet, it doesn't actually seem that overpowered. Trying to request one to help me with a 6 pop ends up costing over 100k, and then they just get eaten by the first templar fleet they come across anyway. Buying enough fleets to actually take it would be closer to 2m, which I think is fairly reasonable. If you give the requested fleets some other useful functions besides trying to help conquer the most ludicrously overpowered planets, it might make sense to increase their cost.