I've been reading Sci Fi for a looong time , I can recommend more than a few "galactic empire" books:

Peter F. Hamilton
almost all of his books (the one's I've read) seem to deal with Galactic Empires

Series: The Reality Dysfunction (really excellent read)
Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained
Fallen Dragon

Series: The Damned by Alan Dean Foster
(A Call to Arms, The False Mirror, Spoils of War)

Christopher B. Rowley: War for Eternity, The Black Ship, and Starhammer

Jack L. Chalker's Well of Souls series

Classics: Asimov's classic Federation series, Heinlein's Starship Troopers, L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, Frank Herbert's Dune (series)

I'll add any more I think of, these are my favorites.

Starship Troopers rules! The second movie was a disgrace, and you should NEVER watch it.

I was going to recommend that and Dune, but you've already done that for me popcorn. Thanks for stealing my thunder! lol

I also have an affinity for galactic struggles, i'll have to check some of those books out myself

P.S. Its Galactic CIVILIZATIONS: Dark Avatar, not Empires. I decided to correct you before you get chewed out by an irrate forum-goer.

While the books aren't spectacular, I recently read the Halo trilogy (and am now reading Ghosts of Onyx) and they are pretty darn good, not many epic space battles, but they are fairly fast reads and fun to boot.

Hm, can't edit my earlier, so:

its Asimov's Foundation series, not Federation, solly

Another great book is David Brin's The Uplift War. There's others in that series, including Startide Rising, but they're not nearly as good. One of the newly-uplifted species in the book are chimps, and they're fun .

More classics: Larry Niven's "Known Space" books. There's a lot of 'em. Alan Dean Foster's version of that includes the Flinx series, and his civilizations are called the Commonwealth.

If you like hi-tech Sci Fi Space Opera, probably my top pick is Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction series. I think its the best I've ever seen in that genre, they're really killer reads.

You might also like Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, e.g. Excession or The Player of Games. He doesn't always spend a lot of time on detailing large-scale battles, but he's always got a very big picture in mind.

There was two movies?

If you want a whole different kind of bad guys--bad guys that make most of the other sci-fi bad guys look kind of timid and whimpy--go with Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series.

To get it started off right, you might as well begin with his prequel to all the others, Bersker Prime. You might not view humanity quite so unsympathetically after you read some of those books.

StarHammer is an oldie but a goody.

David Brin's original Uplift works were great--StarTide Rising (won a Hugo, I think) and The Uplift War both are amazing, although as the storyline advances, the subsequent books aren't quite as good.

Asimov's Foundation series is viewed by many as the best science fiction series ever written, although it's more about personal narratives within the struggle of huge powers, and there are virtually no fleet battles.

Another great read for a bit more action is Vernor Vinge--A Fire on the Deep and its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, are both amazing reads with a major epic feel to them. Only limited fleet-to-fleet combat scenes, but well developed and VERY suspenseful. And these feature other, chillingly different kinds of bad guys as well...

Varies indeed. I never liked Stargate and found it much more "schlocky" than Bab5. To me, however, schlock implies camp, but Webster's declares it to mean "shoddy, of low quality or value".

One series that I watched had, to my mind, minimal "schlock", but was so dour and depressing that I didn't like it much - Space Above and Beyond.

The topic is good sci fi books, people. Which movies "suck" and why "my tv show is better than your tv show" never goes anywhere good.

I'm not a mod, just someone who wants to hear from everyone about good literary space opera!