Here are some thoughts after playing for around 3 hours.
Combat:
Feels solid and is easy to get into which is great, especially that you can see the most effective weapon on a target is amazing but I have had a hard time identifying all objects on the screen. Especially Interceptors and Escape Pods are sometimes hard to spot between gunfire animations. Everything is very colorful (ships, gunfire, background) which can easily overload the screen and gives it a chaotic feel.
Regarding the Strategy part:
Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by the information thrown at me and sometimes I didn't really know what I should do next. The tutorials are great when they explain what each screen does but they could give more insight on how the empires interact (what can cause a war for example) with each other and how you can affect them in the right way.
Some minor bugs, ideas, random stuff:
Minor Bug: When entering the advanced start menu you get "mouseover"-tooltip messages from the underlying game settings window while the "better try quick start" message is up.
Minor Bug: On the Federation Screen "Create Federation with xy" Lines can overlap the Faction name when there are too many in a single Faction box
Minor Bug: Not sure if this is one but anyway: In the "advanced start" game mode with tutorial turned off you still get messages for doing something "good"/"bad" for the first time and visiting the black market.
Suggestion: "Close" buttons are sometimes difficult to find especially on the Faction detail page, they could be bigger or use other colors.
Suggestion: Would be nice to have an extra "Game saved - Press ok to continue" window after saving, just to be sure you didn't click the wrong button or something like that
Suggestion: The Planet details list only uses a tiny part of the screen while the rest is pretty much empty, it would make it easier to spot the right information if it would be some sort a horizontal list instead.
Suggestion: Solar System Background music feels very "dominant" (don't know if that is the right word) and doesn't really add to the atmosphere. A slower more atmospheric one would better fit
(Sorry for my bad english, I hope this was helpful)
