The combat kind of is lackluster. But, you can auto-resolve all your battles, which is what I usually do. Not that that makes it any deeper, of course. The combat is so shallow though, what with picking cards and hoping you get lucky with the RNG for the enemy cards that there's hardly a point to it. Of course the cinematics of the ships blasting away at each other are beautiful, but they also take a while to play so you'll usually watch them once or twice and then stop, especially in long drawn-out wars.
The research screen isn't terrible. At least, I've seen worse. You can easily zoom out and in to whatever technology you need, you can tell at a glance how far you've progressed in any tree, and it has a search function that can be useful. The far zoom is basically for zooming out and then in on the other side, since it zooms to your cursor. The mid zoom is, as far as I can tell, for people who have played the game so much already that they know which tech they want by icons (semi-useless for most people). And of course the close zoom is for actually reading what everything does. It's functional.
I haven't played much since it actually got out of beta, so I can't say if diplomacy has been improved from "REJECTED: DIPLOMACY TERM" as a response to your offers, but I would hope that it has. Empire management, I believe, is still a little fiddly. At least last time I played there was no way to mass change the build queues on multiple planets at once, which is a bad thing since there are several techs that, once researched, you'll basically want to put on all your systems immediately. With 20-30 systems all with their own build queue that you don't necessarily want to destroy and start over, this means adding a tech, and then dragging it to the top of the list over and over and over and over and AAAAAGH! I mean come on, Civ IV had good queue management done right years ago. Just copy/paste that and call it a day.
So yeah, it is a very pretty game, but still somewhat lacking in depth. You can get a lot of fun out of it, but it still has a few rough edges. If it's not calling your name right now, I'd say put it on your wish list for the Christmas sale when it will no doubt be half off or so.
