[Suicide Junkie]

You can't load stock empires. All the racial stuff is different!

Just create a new empire for yourself, and let the game choose random AIs for you.
Easy as that.

If you want to be able to select a shipset that is not in CB by default, go into se4\CB\races and create a new, empty folder with the shipset name.
The game will use the pictures from your root races folder automatically.