Space Empires IV - Board Game!

[spoon]

Suicide Junkie said:
Once we got into the flow of things, there was very little downtime.
While the other guy is pondering his movement, you take a look at your mitt full of components and decide what ships you're going to build.

Looks like it works great then for two-player... How long did it take you guys to do a turn? Maybe downtime wouldn't show up until you did 3-4 players?
Also, if you guys weren't really expanding, you might want to consider either 1) trying it to see if it is more effective - and then see if that has an impact on turn length or 2) making it more tempting to expand (easier to do, better rewards, etc), or 3) Excluding the option to expand and simplifying the game down to what you like: good ol' fashioned ship-to-ship combat.