The first Alpha build is impressive. It could use a lot of hot keys, though.

The hot keys for "govern", 'technology", etc. look like the kind of things that were on the function keys in GC1 and GC2.

One mouse operation that is weak is for setting a target for moving a ship. A right click will move a ship towards/to the clicked upon tile, but a held right click shows no more than the tile the mouse is currently over (as it does if a mouse button is not pressed), and when the RMB is released nothing happens. It would be nice to see how far that tile is from the ship and the path the ship must take to get there, but I don't think it would be good to have it show this unless the RMB is pressed and held. Then, after moving the pointer around (if desired), releasing the RMB should start the ship moving to that tile.