No worries about the delay, I was away from itch.io for a good while anyway. Literally checking for the first time right now, haha! Thanks for the detailed reply as well.
Okay interesting, so with regards to gaining power, it seems a need to think a little more abstract and not be afraid to give a faction a whole slew of tokens if the fiction seems to indicate they might have taken a boatload of power. So rather than taking it only from another faction, I could also have them take full control of a resource. It's possible I could put them "in power" without taking a single token from another faction, if there are enough available.
With regards to the free-floating token, basically what happened is a resource was lost and I wasn't sure what to do with the token that was left on it, haha! I decided to kind of leave it sitting there as a nebulous "power up for grabs", but it never did really sit well with me.
Thanks again for the deep reply, but one final question! Given your summary... Would you say a game should aim to have all the potential power in the city tied up with factions (give or take a few)?
I get the feeling overall that the main mistake I've been making with my approach is I've been a bit too tentative with power distribution, waiting for the game to tell me exactly how many tokens to allocate and assuming "one token" when it didn't. It feels like I need to be a bit more liberal with factions acquiring power.