About the apparent lack of stock empires...

[Will]

StarJack said:
And it's going to confuse and frustrate anyone who is playing SE or 4x for the first time. Did someone actually make a conscious decision to not include any default human player empires? And not provide a walkthru creating your first empire in the manual, or a tutorial? Or was it just over looked?

There ARE default human empires (at least from the demo, I've been too busy lately to install the full version ). Use the quickstart, and you can select one of the races to play.

I would say that it would be more confusing for new players to have multiple copies of the 'same' empire that correspond to different starting options. Or more confusing to have one empire file, and have error messages pop up saying the empire is, for example, using too many racial points. Or having pre-made empire files that use the minimum racial points, and new players complain about the AI or multiplayer humans "cheating" by having bonuses that they don't have.