The politics are becoming really engaging, fairly complex situations are unfolding.
STAND BY FOR SLOPPILY FORMATTED STORY
Viscount Yanavo to our east has (as far as I can figure) been looking at destroying Sheb, me, and sheb's other vassals because currently we are the most likely to win. If you can hold 4k prestige for 10 turns, then you win the game, and Sheb is at 2.6k right now. This is also at this point a fair bit more than anyone else has.
Anyways, Yanavo's little empire fell apart because his vassal Zagata to his north attacked one of Yanavos other vassals over the boarding of one of his scout vessels (to check for contraband). Zagata managed to convince Baroness Agiran to Yanavos south, (who had only just joined Yanavo) that Yanavo was a crazy tyrant and needed to die. Zagata then proceeded to try to convince us to join him, but we were reluctant to do so. Just today I unilaterally declared war on Yanavo since we were taking too long and Yanavo was starting to recover. (sorry sheb, this guy has to go down, its for the good of the team) Yanavo managed to get both of Zagatas vassals to join him instead, which has improved his position significantly.
I'm currently trading with some of our enemies vassals who shall remain nameless, frantically building up my ship production capacity so I can fight an extended war with Yanavo, and am in the process of training and deploying large numbers of agents to keep an eye on enemy territory.
This is all shaping up to be pretty exciting.