[noxious]

It's a totally irrelevant issue. Creating a new account for a free to play game takes a minute. If you want to make another account to play another empire, just make another account. It's the most trivial thing in the world.

Spies create separate accounts anyway, since they need to be able to dualbox to spy effectively, so the spy consideration is not part of the equation.

Yeah, they should probably just let a single account access all empires since account hopping is so easy, but if they don't, who cares. Spend an extra 15 seconds switching accounts when you want to switch between characters on different empires; it's not going to kill you.