[Malorn]

Yeah the double teaming behavior is something I've expressed concern with but I don't think the solution is more or less empires. 3 is the right number. 3 also prevents any 1 empire from completely dominating, which you will get with 2. Not having any empires at all is just dumb, you'd end up with infrequent conflict and much smaller scale battles as outfits fight each other instead of entire empires. The empires bring the scale by drawing the lines in a clear easy to understand way. Without them there is no massive scale warfare, at least not on a regular basis.

The key things to fight it off are the uncaps on every continent, giving you territory vulnerable for capture on any continent, and Empire missions. The empire missions could be quite lucrative and they could program them to prefer putting missions against the largest empire so there's natural incentive to not double-team, and a way out of it via the uncaps if it does happen.

I think more may be required but it all depends on how they do the missions and how lucrative they are.