Hi everyone,
Iam trying to keep it short:
Overall Impression: Pretty polished, stable and fun for a beta. The "just one more turn"-Feeling is right there and time transcends (too) quickly. 
However there is room for improvement still:
- In the colony screen it would be really helpful if you could add a small map of the planet and about 10 tiles of its surounding space. If you need to focus for instance on culture-related improvements I actually now have to leave the colony Screen, look at the map to see the planet is Close to an enemies culture-border and then reenter the colony Screen.
- It would be nice if you could Setup a shipyard to automatically build and send constructors to a defined starbase until the sent constructors equal the available modules of a starbase (then reset the shipyard to idle)-
- Similarly it would be nice if you could tell a shipyard to send other ships directly towards a rally-point of choice. On immense maps this would reduce some unnecessary micro Management.
- The ship designer for me seems a bit less easy to use compared to GC2, this might be subjective as my GC2 time has been a while. However I find it difficult to select appropriate design-items right away because the Icons in the Toolbox not necessarily give a good idea of shape and size of the item. Overall I had an easier time constructing new ship-design in GC2. However I like that we can now add rotation-animations right there. I could certainly also use a few more standardized central hull-sections (cubes/cuboids). Starting from that very small first anchor-Point cube is kinda tedious for larger ships in my opinion.
- I also encountered that auto-design bug, that the game creates redundant templates when new Technology is available, e.g. the game upgrades the "Cruiser M1" to "Cruiser M2", however also a multitude of "Cruiser-L MX" and "Cruiser-P MX" are created with different description, but mostly also empty (cargo not used fully). Also my own designs are made invisible by the game. Would also be nice if the filter "Own designs" would actually only Show my designs. 
-Suggestion also: allow to review obsoleted designs, and allow to delete/make obsolete multiple designs at once (e.g. add checkboxes to the design entries)
- culture flipping seems still a bit strong. I use it myself, but sometimes it simply is not transparent how the influence area expands or collapses, would be good to get better Information via tooltip or some Graphs.
- I would however suggest a Change like this: if a planet is inside foreign influence it should not immediatly start the countdown to flipping, instead it should reduce the happyness of the planet and when the happyness reaches a certain low threshhold (<33%?) the planet revolts and flipps. This would allow planets/Empires focussing on approval to keep their colonies. The malovent trait is also imbalancing right now, first, you dont see who has this trait (only by its effect), second it allows to colonize extreme worlds inside an enemies sphere of influence stack it with Culture improvements and then flip the enemies planets from the inside out. Having to declare war to prevent this seems legit, but not the best choice for everyone.
- Bug: when loading a game and immediatly finishing the turn (or adding other ways of stress to the game like fast zooming in and out) the game crashes due to background activities not having finished and causing some race conditions it seems.
- Bug? I have not a single source of Elerium in my galaxy at the Moment 
(but loads of Antimatter and Deuterium)
- Bug?: I cannot reach the end of the culture-related tech tree due to intermediate tech being disabled in beta, dont know if this is intended to block the enabled techs afterwards...
- some "creativity"-trait would be nice, that could allow to research 1 or more related improvement tech upon researching a Major tech, e.g. you research warp drives and have a good Chance to immediatly get some of the "Improved Warp drive" techs....
Beside the occasional Crash the game runs well on my Quadcore I5 with Windows 8.1 x64 and 16 GB RAM. 
Thanks for your Attention and sorry for the spelling, my browser tries to correct everything with german language settings.
