-Bloo-,
Yautja,
12 years ago
I don't remember if you had to fight one in AVP2, but you did get to see one unconscious on a flat bed.
It's speculated that an Empress is just an old Queen, like the difference between a man in his thirties and one in his fifties (or something even more similar like a Drone to a Warrior). There isn't an actual transformation taken to achieve the state, not like a Queen/Empress morphing into a Queen Mother or a Drone/Warrior morphing into a Queen.
I still like the idea of a lone Drone 're-configuring' a single organism's entire biological structure to turn it into an egg (possibly housing a Super Facehugger if totally alone) more than Warriors or Praetorians morphing into a Queen, but these two methods coexisting in the life-cycle canon is, in my opinion, perfectly possible. The only problem is the films only showing the former while the latter exists only in games.