Neptune's Pride is a great game and the backstabbing / intrigue are definitely some of the qualities that I'd like to see carried over to Empire. I think one of the big things that makes land grabbers a target in NP is that the player standings are always known so the front runners are obvious which makes the need to form alliances more clear to other players as well. We've recently been talking about implementing a more clearly defined scoring system in Empire as well so players would have more awareness of what's going on in the world around them without revealing exactly what they're doing.

Kyle - When you say a more complicated build que what do you mean? Longer build times? More steps in a tech tree to accomplish certain tasks, etc..