Hey Stardock.  Thought I'd give my impressions and feedback playing the first release alpha.

Overall I'm liking it   I'll probably stalk the development and check in when you add the next bit you want feedback on

Some notes, regarding where I come from playing Gal Civ.  Haven't really played any of the previous incarnations.  Like my TBS though, started with MOO, then MOO 2, civ, civ 2 TOT, civ 4 and civ 5, HOMM 3 and 4, Elemental WOM and F  I also like a broad range of other genres including RTS, aRPG, jRPG, and whichever RPGs Baldurs gate and the likes fall into

My thoughts, in no particular order (I'll try and skip things that are in the TODO basket):

1. The economic wheel makes managing your mix of savings/ production/ research very easy
2. The economic wheel makes me tend to generalise every planet.  Good or Bad, depends on what our design wants people to do re planet specialisation.
3. BUG - ship paths calculate with 1 extra move.  ie a 2 move scout will calculate a 5 movement path as 2 turns. Holds true for faster ships.
4. The research fields don't lead me to immediately know where to go (besides weapons and ship defense).  It normally takes me at least 2 guesses to find what I'm looking for.
5. Graphics are already looking nice and very smooth.
6. Tab to get to the next idle ship sometimes takes a few seconds to think.
7. No crashes!  Wow and its an alpha!
8. I swear there's some techs in currently that don't give me anything new to play with (or boost numbers). This might be because I look for the little icon in each tech to tell me what it is I'm getting, so if its not there, I assume I get nothing.
9. Couldn't find a nice small tooltip or anything telling me how much effect extra food will help my colony, and just what effect it will have.  Would be nice to know if +food is good for growth, or only helpful getting larger max population.  Will help people decide where in their build queue to place it.
10. Probably just a content not in yet thing, but the anomalies laying around tend to be almost always +gold, with the odd +science thrown in.  would be nice to have a broader range of things. 
11. Why can only my survey ship do anything with anomalies?  Might want to include in a tooltip that it can only be explored by a survey ship.
12. The techs that allow you a choice of which upgrade.  Should they then let you pick the other two upgrades after?  Seems odd.  I would have thought you get to pick 1 of 3, then its finished and you can start researching the next tier tech.
13. Holy wow a freebie ship early game is crazy.  10/5 missile att/def, with 20hp, 4 moves.  Compared to the first ship I got to make with weapons being 4 (i think) missile attack, 10Hp, and move 2.  Seems the free ship is crazy overkill.
14. Is there supposed to be a random event EVERY time i colonise a planet.  Because there is.  Not something I expected, especially when I colonise a planet without any inherent bonuses, or marked anomalies.  Perhaps mark planets with something telling you that colonising the planet has a higher chance of a category of random events occurring.  Eg, "Technology anomaly on planet" - "Scanners have picked up odd readings coming from the planet unlike any we've seen before.  Higher chance of random tech event". or something?  This would also make choosing the next planet to colonise a bit more to think about rather than, yup highest number first.
15. building synergies are cool.  I think its going to get tedious with the number of colonies you end up with though. Unfortunately the way its setup means that some form of template won't work very well either.

Anyways, thankyou guys and gals for making what looks like will end up an awesome game