Not to hijack this thread, but this certainly seems like it will affect how players in future games will approach the game. Doesn't that blur the lines between any of the three specialties? All Warlords will sign up as Traders, but fulfill the win condition of Warlords - so why have specialties at all, since already any specialty can research all tech requirements for all the other specialties, correct?
I'll admit, this game isn't how I imagined it would be. I didn't realize how similar each of the three specialties would feel before I started. I thought Traders would be the ones out harvesting and trading - as in trading CO/RO to Warlords to power their armies in exchange for a peace treaty, protection or building defense systems; or by trading to Researchers for the Researchers to study and manipulate the CO/RO. And I thought researchers would be focused solely on research and sell that knowledge to Warlords to build armies or to Traders to improve their CO/RO accumulations. That sort of interaction. I didn't realize we would all end up doing virtually the same things - harvest routes, outposts, colony ships, trade routes, research queue.... repeat daily. I have tried playing each specialty type on different servers and unless I go to my research queue in each one, I could easily forget which win condition I was aiming for since all the procedures are basically the same.
And now it turns out I don't even need to know which specialty I signed up for.