Balancing Clockpunk Influences?

[LoA]

So I'm working on another iteration of Panorah, and one critical change I'm making is that the rats are no longer just sneering imperialists, albeit very effective ones... Now their technologically advanced sneering imperialists! The idea is that each race is good at certain magical things. Mice are in tune with "animals", Squirrels are great at nurturing magical plants, Badgers are in tune with the magics of the earth (They're basically more restrained dwarves), Hares have a savant like ability to read minds, Otters are tied to the magic that flows through water, Weasels are Mesopotamian/Egyptian warriors that are spiritually connected to the dead, and are capable of channeling their ancestors power. and finally the rats are highly inventive and intelligent, making mechanical wonders. Basically imagine if the rats had like twenty Leonardo Da Vinci's, along with a bunch of Merlin's, and the money to actually build huge airships, ornithopters, and those spirally helicopters. Plus clockpunk monorails running through their capital, etc etc. Point is they have technological assets, and I would describe it as "Davincipunk"

So my main problem is figuring out how much imperial/political influence do the rats have. One thing to keep in mind is that this world is going through a miniature apocalypse from a volcanic eruption that devastated the ecosystem, and caused a famine that the creeps (my word for people) are just crawling out of. Lots of wars have been fought, and more are on the way. Monsters are rising from their layers and are beginning to reemerge. Basically it's like a soft Dark Sun, with a peppering of Eberron, and deep fried in Redwall.

But that brings up another point. Having a technologically advanced civilization but I want to have a kind of "desperate" tone to the setting, so it's not just fighting a horde of the week like in Redwall (as much as I love those books...), but wouldn't giving the Rats that kind of power make them the natural enemy? I mean look at how much power Britain had from it's navy assets. And that's basically what i'm going for. The rat civilization is a British/Renaissance Italy hybrid. How can I make it so they don't become the natural enemy? I kind of want everyone to be potentially the bad guy, and making one side the Fire Nation feels kind of cheap.

[Ghostman]

You could give the rats an enemy that can't be overcome but has to be continuously fended off, to tie their resources so that they can't afford more than the occasional strike against other creeps.

[Gilladian]

It seems to me that if the rats are technology magic, they may also be tied into law and order. Many people see technological advancement as almost wholly good, so it would also be easy to paint them as the "bringers of wonder" to all the other races. The biggest problem I see is that they might easily overpower everyone else. Ghostman's idea of making them always tied down in an almost unwinnable war is a good one. Or give them some other serious limitation - what natural resource do they need to power their devices? Some sort of energy crystal? Or maybe they only function where the Ley Lines are strong, and are thus limited in geographic spread.