So, I've "played" my first game on the alpha version.
I won't speak about graphics and UI as these are not my primary concern.
About the game, my very first feeling was that I was playing Galactic Civilization II. That's not good. I feel that we are not seing any significant changes from the previous GalCiv versions. Possibly people that read this post will point out to me some major differences, but the only exception I saw (a very good one btw) is the Ideology choice panel.
One: In GalCiv, my empire never looks like an empire ; rather a collection of unrelated planets that are independant from each other. So, in every planet, I have to balance food production (which supports population levels) with other productions. Even now, in our countries, things don't work like this: cities are interconnected, and food is produced distantly. One could say the same thing for indutry or research. It is my feeling that the galactic empire cannot feel like a real emprie if such interconnection cannot be done. While reasearch is indeed shared (all research going into the same pool) there should be a way to share production and food. This would probably involve setting up a freighter force pool ; which might possibly be vulnerable to enemy attacks (think submarine attacks in ww2) : this could open up a whole avenue of new techs and tactics. Also, such sharing allows one to specialize planets as agricultural planets or industrial planets or research planets or financial planets..., something that's hard to achieve in the galciv series. even though such specializations appear in most Scifi settings I know about. The one exception I see (a welcome improvement) is the "sponsor" planet choice for starport. That's a good step in the right direction. Far from sufficient yet.
Two: Planet development is not very fun. This was true even in GalCiv2. Why ? Unfortunately, most buildings work as +% to something. That feels more like an excel sheet and doesn't translate immediately in the player mind into something meaningfull. Indeed, the feeling can be quite wrong: building a +100% building might look great. But possibly, once built (after a long investment), you may discover that it isn't exactly what you thought: applying +100% over a low base value is not that big... The human mind is well suited for simple additions : buildings should likely often follow that rule. This is already true for some od them (farms for exemple), but most others don't.
Three: Somehow, many such games provide population management: you assign your population some tasks. You just don't only build the buildings, but you should man them. In the civilization series, each pop unit goes to some task, be it on map (producing from a countryside hex), or in a building (as specialist) ; this results in cinvilization city management being like a mini game in the game: how to better organize my population to reach my goal ? In galciv, such a feature could bring much. In particular, it could avoid the "I build all hexes" syndrom: as of now, there is no reason not to fill every hex in a planet. Indeed, there are good reasons to do so (more % bonus) and one focuses mostly on raw building production. The amount of population you have comes behind, as its immediate effect is far from obvious. Assigning population units to buildings would make population growth a visible goal (even though it currently is important, but is somewhat hidden in the background figures.)
To be continued...