Will there be some sort of punishment for players that simply stop playing?
Is it possible to see that?

Overall: Very nice. Fair and clear!

I propose a few small changes: The page is rather long (vertically) so I propose that only the top 6 players of each race are displayed. Additionally, once a player logs in, his/her place in the standings should be displayed on the leaderboard, so the player can see their position relative to the leaders. As such:

1. top player
2. #2 player
3. #3 player
4. #4 player
168. The player ranked just above me.
169. Me

People will like to see where they stand without having to sift through the full leaderboard for each race.

To cut down on page length maybe instead of shorting each list to six each list could be hidden or shown by toggling a +/- button like a directory tree in windows.

I'd also like to see where I am in the current standing.

Awesome! :)
I want those achievements... ;)

Kudos for the leader board!

I have a few suggestions. One is that it would be much more useful to know the quality of other players in absolute terms. Right now, someone that plays a lot of games may have more achievement score than someone that plays less games but wins them. Solution: a simple average of players finishing positions would do it. So if someone finished 2nd, 4th and 6th, their avg would be 4th. Players would need to play in a min of 3 games. You could rank all players this way and/or run it by race. If you wanted to get fancy, you could make this a rolling average of say the last 10 games or you could allow anyone that places 1st to drop their lowest finish. The main point is something that reports player quality independent of games played (after meeting a certain threshold). Right now I don’t know if someone with high achievement is actually any good or simply plays a lot of games at a so-so level.

The old ladder had a reliability score. # of turns turned in over # that should have been turned in. This %age calls attention to those that are less than committed and could be used as a criteria for tournament style games. It was also useful when considering others for alliances – “is this guy likely to flake out on me?”

Finally, it won’t take long before top players figure out how to rack up experience with little effort. All they have to do is drag the game out and delay winning by slowing down production of things that add to the score. Each turn they delay they get more experience points than the prior turn, plus pts for ships and planets. The longer winning players drag the game out the more experienced they get. I would argue that top commanders are able to win sooner – not later. In this reward system, they would do better if they dragged out the game well past when it is fun.