Things have changed a lot for this species in the past year.
For hundreds of thousands of years they have been living in a civilization that is most similar to ancient and medieval eras, this coupled with their high birthrate and young birthability age resulted in their evolution adapting to an environtment of basically perpetual ancient/medieval competition, conflict, and war.
This is most visible on the appearance of their males: the ones with the most efficient natural armor and natural combat ability got to live longer amidst the battles and agressive culture, and also were preferred socially and in mating, thus they slowly evolved into creatures with natural armor and weapons, with large scales whose toughness ranges from crocodile scale-like, to almost the strength of steel on the hardest areas. Also a heavy, mace-like tailtip, and knuckle-covering scales of appropriate toughness.

All what they knew and adapted to was gone from one week to another when the great galactic war reached their world, many died, but many remained and put up a surprisingly tenacious resistance against the cheap, lowly mercenaries the Donothar left behind to maintain the seemingly low-tech thus low conquest-effort planet.
Many of these, and also many who were rescued by interstellar efforts and put into refugee worlds, experienced a sudden influx of technology that was beyond what they ever imagined as possible.

Even though their world is in most part not theirs anymore, the tools they get to play with now act as a certain consolation, and also as food for thought for how much more possibilities they now have to enact revenge and reclaim their homes eventually...