This is a new feature (0.5.0) and it's still only a shadow of what you will be allowed to do in the final game. Anyway, the Empire Manager will allow you to manage your empire, conduct diplomacy, read the galactic news and to keep in touch with what happened recently.

Right now this is where you can see the stats of your empire: military strength, money, sector held and number of ship.

You can toggle the automatic empire manager. If active, you will automatically expand and build new factories and war ships. And if you are at war with a neighboring faction, you will automatically invade sectors. If disabled all of this stops, but factories will continue to manage themselves.

You can also toggle the bounty system. If enabled, your faction will automatically put bounties on the head of those who destroyed your ships and pay accordingly if possible. However, there's no AI bounty hunters yet (version 0.5.0).

Many more options will be gradually introduced here during development.

This is the diplomacy screen, it list all the different factions, their military strength and their attitude toward you. You can either use the 'contact' button or double click the list to contact a faction. So far you can only declare war and peace, but here again much more options will be unlocked gradually during development.

That's self explanatory. This page lists the major news in the galaxy: Declaration of war/peace, sectors changing hand and so on. Most of the text in the 'content' section is place holder and dates are missing, though.

This is where you can track news relevant to your ships and empire. So far only the destroyed ships and the bounties you got are list here. More things will be gradually added during development.

Several tabs will be added later to list and manage your ships, stations and sectors through a list system.