Managed to get a 3 player game of Imperium: Classic in with my group. It was a tough teach but by the end we had reasonable grasp on the mechanics. Still very little clue what we should do. Points were pretty wild. One player stumbled on an absolute gold mine of points and won handily. I don't yet see such a huge difference between the three easiest decks, we all played pretty much the same and after exhausting a good chunk of the common decks I'm worried that there's not a whole lot of variability in that area. Downtime with 3 players is also pretty extreme towards the end. The game took us almost a full 3 hours (with teaching) and I'd say this is about the maximum that we can tolerate. We definitely prefer Earth in this regard. It also takes about this long but you're doing stuff constantly. We'll give it another shot one of these weeks before we decide on it's future...