I've just finished my first run through of the alpha, poking and prodding at things. Didn't play with the Shipyard yet, although that looks interesting. A lot of my notes below I imagine are already on the to-do list with this being an Alpha, but figured I'd write down what I noticed, saw, irritated, liked, etc.
Background: Played GalCiv 1 and 2 to death, STILL play MOO2 from time to time with friends, bought MOO3 and set the box on fire in a ritual designed to try to cleanse the demons from that thing... 
Anyway, few notes:
1) Hexes rock. Love it. The ships showing where they'll be 1, 2, 3+ turns away very nice as well. I like the graphics work thus far overall, actually, as well as the UI (although bringing back shown (or mouse-over?) keyboard shortcuts would be nice).
2) Having the bonus tiles re-used from GalCiv2 but not really relate to what they were before (the previous 700% research square is something unrelated to research now, etc. etc.) was a little irksome.
3) Unable to queue up destroying existing structures (ala upgrading them in GalCiv2). I can understand needing to destroy before build, but being able to queue that would be nice. Also, queue times for later structures should assume bonuses from earlier ones (GalCiv2 doesn't do this either...) i.e. if I'm building 3 manufacturing plants in a row, plant 2's build time should assume the bonuses from plant 1 will there.
4) No starship auto-launch option (that I could find) resulted in having to watch colonies carefully and occasionally click through to find ships to launch. I also missed the various colored dots from GalCiv2 around colonies giving shipyard status, colony status, etc. at a glance.
5) Went to attack a stacked group of enemy ships and mine just went and joined them on the tile, did not attack. I pulled back out and retried and it attacked then. Weird. Looking forward to seeing what the space combat will be/look like/etc.
6) Initial colonies on bonus tiles suck, although I see other posts about that, but it was an initial "Ehh!" Reminds me of a long-standing gripe with GalCiv2 where you get prompted to set a planetary governor on colonization.... with the bottom half or so of tiles hidden so you can't see their bonuses.
7) If we could see the tech tree soon, it would help just to get a feel for it. Right now, I think the tech tree is very, very fragmented - whether that's good or bad I haven't decided yet. I would almost like to see perhaps the ability to research one "main" tech plus one of the star-improvement type refinements at the same time, or able to plan research out more than one step, or perhaps able to research multiple items at once. Maybe with a small bonus to doing 2-3 (not all scientists would want to be dead focused on the same thing, after all), penalties for more (too fragmented), a penalty for a single tech (you're focusing all your efforts on something you need RIGHT NOW but some folks aren't going to be happy about it).
