[Puke]

to add fuel to the empire raid idea (a great idea there) you might want to throw in some fleets of mothballed ships. in order to acquire them, you would have to either capture them with bording parties (never actually tried fighting against a mothball fleet, so i dont know how it works.. have to try it.. do they get shields?) or force the owner to surrender (neutral empire starting on one world somewhere).

you could make it trickier by putting the neutral empire off in one corner of the map, and stashing their mothball fleets in a nebula somewhere else. you would have to race around with a construction ship to unmothball them inorder to build up your numbers, and you would have to do it before your competition found them.

this could even be done in the same vein as the old Andromeda or Voyager scenarios that were written earlier. you start with one ship, and you start acquiring more as you progress. let conquest be the goal, but let the starting ship be sucky instead of mighty. sneak around capturing and refitting mothball ships untill you have enough remote miners to sustain an income, and enough warships to form a fleet.