A few things:
Will ship exp will be included in the finished version and work similarly to how it did in gc2? For whatever reason I find the game much more fun to play when my ships can level up. At the moment I don't find the beta very much fun, I think if you included ship exp in the next patch I would play it more. I hope you're not planning on putting it off into DLC or something, at that point I doubt I'd bother.
It would also be nice if there was a resource in game that explained what stuff did, especially in regard to how combat works and what tactical combat speed does. I am familiar with how it all worked in gc2 but tactical speed in new. And if you preserved the logic the computer uses to select priority targets in combat, it would helpful if you allowed the player to know that information in game when fleet information was selected. Right now fleet details aren't available, but in order to see which ship the AI targeted in GC2 you had to just start a combat or do some fairly annoying math that kept changing with ship hp.
Some bonuses increase the level of certain structures built on them and some seem to indicate they should increase the level of certain structures built around them, but the area bonuses don't seem to work in game.
I can't tell if research points accumulated over a breakthrough are lost or saved. There seems to be some carryover, but why not just let more than one tech be developed in a single turn?
I liked how in gc2 different tiles had different colors which let you know which terraforming technologies would unlock them, I assume you'll add this into gc3?
On the whole my impression is that this game is identical to gc2 minus some features I found fun or convenient, like ship xp. I hope some legit new features are coming in subsequent patches. At the moment there isn't any point in testing it more, it's just like gc2 but worse. The adjacent tile system is maybe a slight improvement but hardly mind blowing.
