Excited with GC III so far.  Going to ignore the obvious "Placeholder for future comments" stuff.

Like (after 15 min or so playing, just had to get this post up):

The "hey you have a ship to move" notice is nice.

Getting free ships from anomalies (colony ship gave quick early boost and another scout was good). 

Had some trouble figuring out why I got +10 pragmatism until I got the next screen unlocking the pragmatism tree.  Once again nice bonus.

Issues:

Auto-explore retraces known-space rather than head for nearest unexplored area.  Waste of time/effort, in my opinion.

In the empire status screen, in the costs section, there is only one cost, a 4 for ship maintenance, all others are zero, but the total is 5, and 5 is used in the "net" uses the wrong number of 5.

Nit-pick, can you toggle the background off in a future release?  The blue ship wire-frames are really hard to see on top of the white/blue background star fields/clouds.

Where's my mining ship?  I have all these asteroids to mine and nothing to exploit them ruthlessly with.

And, question.  Are the anomalies generated at games start and fixed (like civ 5) or generated just prior to your viewing them?  I see the planet rewards are generated when you colonize (but actual per-hex bonuses are fixed).

So far I'm really liking it, as bare bones as you say it is.  Hard to believe it's going to get better.

pek