YMMV / Shadow Empire

• Goddamned Bats: Non-aligned marauders in general. They're not particularly tough, but in the beginning, there's a lot more of them than your units, and all they have to do is move into your regime's hexes to make them their own, eating away at your empire's borders until you can properly exterminate them. And they graduate to Demonic Spiders if they manage to reach even one hex of the only road you built between your HQ and your troop's current frontline, because now you've got supply problems crippling your army.
• Spiritual Successor: Considered by many to be one of the closest things to a Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri successor.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The manual not only describes humanity's history in the Shadow Empire setting, from the 21st century on Earth to a fallen galactic power in the 83rd century, but includes the backstory of how Emperor Anubis secretly achieved immortality (of a widespread nanotech hive-mind sort), became a hidden post-human entity known as the Shadow, and deliberately caused the Dissolution War. There's the possibility that your regime is lead by a Shadow Lord who is (mostly) an extension of the Shadow's consciousness, but once you're playing the actual game, this plot thread never comes up again.