An emperor rains down riches, entertainment, status and power on his most loyal subjects so he can eat, drink, sleep and reproduce while others do his job for him xD

He can also punish failures, though if his subjects fail that usually means he didn't delegate tasks very good.

He probably also has to deal with his (royal) family and royalty and/or ambassadors from other countries.

Oh, reproduction is the most important, biologically humans mainly enjoy power to increase their reproduction-chances;

bastard-children would be plentifull, and could potentially be put in places of high power, or just be left to take their own chance,

official offspring would have to be protected and made ready to fullfill the role of emperor.

Oh, reproduction is the most important, biologically humans mainly enjoy power to increase their reproduction-chances;

bastard-children would be plentifull, and could potentially be put in places of high power, or just be left to take their own chance,

official offspring would have to be protected and made ready to fullfill the role of emperor.

Hate to say this, but one of the major differences between a king and an emperor is that the emperor is not hereditary: it is based on merit and bestowed by a third party (often a religious power).

Having children is thus rather pointless, more often than not, emperors that attempted to pass their powers to their sons created a revolution.

In an empire, the emperor tends to be middle-aged to old as succession is rarely won by a young unproven fellow...

Do not forget we are talking about space emperors here :) Do not be tied by Earth's history (it's just one measly planet, thus not representative at all :D)

Oh, reproduction is the most important, biologically humans mainly enjoy power to increase their reproduction-chances;

bastard-children would be plentifull, and could potentially be put in places of high power, or just be left to take their own chance,

official offspring would have to be protected and made ready to fullfill the role of emperor.

Hate to say this, but one of the major differences between a king and an emperor is that the emperor is not hereditary: it is based on merit and bestowed by a third party (often a religious power).

Having children is thus rather pointless, more often than not, emperors that attempted to pass their powers to their sons created a revolution.

In an empire, the emperor tends to be middle-aged to old as succession is rarely won by a young unproven fellow...

This is not accurate. Many prominent empires involved dynasties of rules connected by heredity. The Byzantine Empire being the obvious example. Just like a kingdom a dynasty can be kicked out and a new one put in place but the goal of all emperors is a lineage that continues upon their death.

Empires are less stable in many cases since you need a larger group of supporters to maintain majority power but they often at least technically based on hereditary succession.

I can think of a few dozen empires in history that were hereditary, but I can't think of one that wasn't besides the Holy Roman Empire, and even they were essentially hereditary for the most part.

Again, please people, SPACE EMPEROR, not historical :) It's for a SF game. Please, please, don't turn this topic into a useless historical discussion.

Well to answer the title directly, nothing. Because the kind of culture needed to run an interstellar society is as far from imperial as can be. Even aside from the fact that a single person could never handle that much complexity. I am speaking strictly to feasibility of space empires.

As far as what random crap you could make up for him to do, he probably does whatever regular emperors do, because otherwise why call him an emperor?

Lots of wining and dining, orgies, random executions, parades in dress cloths. If you have instant communication he might be an admiral of a fleet or something.

From the games I've seen of yours you aren't seriously asking what his day to day routine is. Day to day routine is boring as shit whether you are an emperor or a serf.

He would probably have meetings with his spymaster and treasurer, but in my experience video games tend to abstract that out to always on menus like resource bars.

Actually an absolute monarchy feudal system makes a lot of sense for a vast civilization. (There are very much major problems with democracy, namely it is hard enough to get twenty people in a club of shared interests to fully agree on something, let alone a few hundred billion spanning dozens of planets.)

At that scale the emperor doesn't need to make direct decisions, he handles high level elements and delegates the actual work and details to others. The emperor is the one setting goals, others do the work to actually achieve them. The key point of the emperor is then to basically bully everyone into making sure the job gets done, and ensuring the right people are in the right places at the highest level. He becomes who the lesser people answer to when things go wrong.

Factories in one sector are under preforming, and that is impacting Imperial Economics? Emperor yells at his minster/lord/whatever in charge of that region, who in turn yells at his subordinates, who yell at their subordinates, etc, etc, and eventually the problem is fixed, or another round of yelling takes place and a few heads roll. If it continues with changes (that the emperor doesn't even really need to know about) at the lower level not having an effect, then the emperor 'steps in' and puts someone else in charge of the whole mess.

Actually an absolute monarchy feudal system makes a lot of sense for a vast civilization. (There are very much major problems with democracy, namely it is hard enough to get twenty people in a club of shared interests to fully agree on something, let alone a few hundred billion spanning dozens of planets.)

At that scale the emperor doesn't need to make direct decisions, he handles high level elements and delegates the actual work and details to others. The emperor is the one setting goals, others do the work to actually achieve them. The key point of the emperor is then to basically bully everyone into making sure the job gets done, and ensuring the right people are in the right places at the highest level. He becomes who the lesser people answer to when things go wrong.

Factories in one sector are under preforming, and that is impacting Imperial Economics? Emperor yells at his minster/lord/whatever in charge of that region, who in turn yells at his subordinates, who yell at their subordinates, etc, etc, and eventually the problem is fixed, or another round of yelling takes place and a few heads roll. If it continues with changes (that the emperor doesn't even really need to know about) at the lower level not having an effect, then the emperor 'steps in' and puts someone else in charge of the whole mess.

This isn't true. Feudal systems are useless at large population values and they are not good for any sort of ingenuity based society. Heredity is a fucking terrible system for quality rulers. Its rife with corruption, too.

Aside from Dune which was more about planet ecology than interstellar politics there are almost no examples of imperial systems in speculative fiction. Sometimes you have them in role playing IPs but that's because its "cool" and "epic."