Cosmic Empires (mod concept)

OK, there's a bit of interest for this over at the Shrapnel forum so I thought I'd post it here too...
Anyone ever played Cosmic Encounter? It's a board game, and if you're not familiar with it, here's the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_encounter
I was thinking, wouldn't it be cool to have a Space Empires 5 mod based on Cosmic Encounter? A few concepts immediately come to mind:
1. Keep the core rules simple. Ships are ships, planets are planets, no "dreadnoughts" or "frigates" or "ringworlds" or whatnot.
2. The diversity of gameplay comes through a boatload of bizarre and unique racial traits - the "Antimatter" power, like in CE, might have something which gives you an advantage when you're the underdog, for instance (not sure how that might work, though... unless we can call an intel script from the game data files and get # of ships present in system! )
3. Alliances and treaties must be engineered to be short-lived. This means they should have a *negative* trade amount stipulation built-in (if at all possible - if not, just max them out on trade quickly), and not allow any elements which encourage long-term cooperation. Backstabbing is a must!

Any ideas/thoughts/whatever?