I cracked open the game for about 2 hours yesterday. Here's are my initial thoughts without reading any of the other discussions going on.
So the game right now has 2 fundamental issues for me. Starting with the easier one to explain - playing this game literally makes my eyes hurt. It's not that the graphics are ugly. Everything is so smushed together, and a lot of the buildings look so similar, trying to discern what is what started to be a strain on my eyes after about an hour. I don't really have a solution for this one.
The second issue is that I'm simply not getting that "one more turn" feeling that you look for in a 4x game. I do have quite a few ideas on this one. Starting with the victory conditions: They all look the same to me. Maybe this is just me not understanding the game mechanics, but I'm reading all of the victory conditions as:
Step 1) Research some random technology
Step 2)
Step 3) Profit
I don't even know what I'm trying to accomplish. With no meaningful long term goals, I can't really form any meaningful short or medium term goals, and those are the things that give you the "one more turn" feel. Maybe these things become clearer after playing longer, but I feel like I should have a better idea of what's going on after 2 hours of playing. I'm also, spending too much time trying to figure out basic game mechanics. I still don't understand how the population cap works. I don't know why higher level housing is better even though it houses fewer people. I only have a vague idea what planet rage is. There are just a lot of things that are only half explained.
I have a few other miscellaneous suggestions that I will probably put into mantis.
On the plus side, there are ton of cool ideas in this game. I'm just not seeing how everything fits together yet.