One campaign and 3 playthroughs later I thought I'd post the thoughts/fun perspective from a non-beta tester who has played decades of 4x games in the past and beaten many games at their maximum difficulty settings (Including SD's GalCivII with expansions)

I'm sure many others have too, and I only mention it in an effort to give a little more weight to my thoughts/observations.  My last two play throughs were on the hardest and 2nd to hardest difficulty setting.  (I got to all the techs and reloaded to pave a way to each of the victory conditions).  I will only include observations that were valid during games after the third patch I had since DLing 1.05b?

Overall Impression
I do like this game, there are good ideas and a good "shell" of a game.  What is missing is a level of polish - more specifically game balance, enough creative content, and some bugs. These Frustrations brought a gaming experience that would have been an 8/10 down to a 4/10.  A fixed/polished elemental can yet become a 10/10.
Galactic Civ II for example in my book evolved from an 8/10 (a few weeks in) to a 9.5/10 by the time all the expansions were out. 

I'll focus on my experiences with these frustration in hopes that they may help future updates up the fun factor.

First, what I like:
- Diverse Creation customization.  I really feel like i'm creating my own leader/faction.  There are also lots of attributes that give this process depth and make it fun. Although I feel like the "give army leader's movement" trait is overpowered - it allowed me to have a movement 40 death stack late game that felt like cheating.
- Style, the artwork feels nice and there is much charm added to the game because of it.
- City Building.  I thought this mechanic was very well thought out and developed, everything seems to mesh together well and is fun to build up. 
- Tech Tree.  This also seems well developed, lots of choices, lots of options, good "rising cost" mechanic etc.
- Diplomacy.  I actually like the depth here alot, it seems to surpass many other 4x games and is a clear elemental strength.  
- Tactical Battles.  I like the concept, ilbeit there are some real balance/feature issues - compared with Civilization tactical battles (none) or GalCiv (auto)
   this is a big improvement and seem to resemble more closely the fun had from Master of Orion II's tactical battles. 
- Modding/Multiplayer (While I have experienced little of either, many 4x games have neither) 

Now that all the nice words have been said, lets get to the gritty

*1.  Game Crashed/Slowdown/Bugs.  These I've seen mentioned tons so I won't go into detail.  
On a Quadcore PC I bought new this year I experience severe slowdowns/memoryleeks, in particular after reloads and in non-cloth mode over large cities.
setting afinity to 1 core helps, playing in clothmode lategame helps more.
Reloading after a save has sometimes "Zapped" a sized 12unit in a size12 stack down to a sized1 unit, this change is  deep in the save somehow and no amounts of reloading was able to fix it.  It happend 4-5 times, sometimes devestating my field army as a result.  In another game a city's ability to construct buildings was also zapped midgame.  (I ended up playing and finishing the game with a gimped city).  This was not a result of no room,resources,conditions being met.  I even scrapped the city down to an empty shell and couldn't build 1 hut.  I spent an hour assuming it was somehow my fault, it wasn't.  (I even have the save file if anyone wants it)

1: Lack of Info
I was told I can get information on stuff by shift right clicking it (I tried all combinations of shift/alt/cntr and clicks and found very few places).
It is harder to enjoy a game when I don't know what the choices I make do.
  Ex:  As empire on the hardest difficulty setting I found out I couldn't recruit a 4th Champion.  Clicking on the units actions told me it cost 52355345.6 gold to recruit.  Was there a unit limit?  (No, I killed one of mine off, same price).  Was it a difficulty setting?  Trait of picking Empire?  I wanted to marry early and have a dynasty, but couldn't recruit the needed companion.  Ended up scrapping the game because of this.  Fun factor down.

2: All of nothing unbalanced battle game mechanics.  (this finally killed it for me)
     I found myself Auto-calculating many battles towards the end.  There were many places where I just couldn't breach an opponents armor with my seasoned units.
I had to build new larger groups with more modern weapons in order to be able to compete in the tactical battle.   I had lots of units, a huge civ...and couldn't puncture through an armored unit without rebuilding a new modern army.  3 ways to fix this
A: Give a way for "quantity" to win over armor.  
   Maybe quantity of units surrounding an opponent reduces their armors effectivnes (allowing a peasant horde to overwhelm an armored unit).
   Something like armor = X - 10% down for every enemy unit bordering.   

B: Give a leeway % to hit.  In old D&D a 20 always hits, civ has somekind of mechanic as well.  This game ---> *DESPERETLY* <---- needs a mechanic that
allows units that can't puncture through a defense to do it.  Maybe set a maximum that armor can block to 95% or 90%  Spells as well.
Many games give you at least 1 damage if you can't break armor.  A Clear 0 or miss downs the fun factor. 

C: Upgrade/Merge.  Allow units to be upgraded/merged when the Technology becomes available.  

D: Take luck more out of the equation.  players that like 4x games largely like tactical boardgames as well, the best tactical boardgames did away with luck.
Right now there is so much randomization that I barely have any idea whats going on in a battle.  I should not be able to beat the hardest difficulty without having so little idea of how it all works.  it seems like the mechanic is 0-100% damage?  maybe there should be some constant.  At any rate the battle mechanics need to be re-worked, unfortunatly everything else would have to be re-balanced.

In another battle I had 7 wizards at level 10-12 with 30ish INT and lots of spells fail to puncture through a dragon with 250ish armor.  I also had two 12 sized archer units that couldnt do it.  Finally a 12 sized military unit with a 400ish attack was able to.  (except that was the unit that got "gimped" from a reload to a size 1, as per my bug desc above, meaning it was another 20 some turns before I rebuilt the unit and fought the dragon).   Shouldn't spells bypass armor?  I had no way to understand why my wizards were so poor at breaking through this dragons armor when a basic attack400 unit could.  (keep in mind these same wizards conquered the world blitz style and lay waste to every other armor on the map)

3: Unclear leveling.
   Does exp get split?  I found out it does not, all units get xp from a battle/quest.  This is very bad as it limited my playstyle to favoring one huge super army to do
all my deeds.  I think having a constant XP from a quest/battle be split among all units (maybe weigh it to the champions 2 to 1?) would be more and improve gameplay *alot*.  Then you can actually have multiple parties without feeling like you are loosing vast amounts of xp.  Also my "kids" automatically regained mana/health in battle, this I couldn't find documented anywhere.

4: Spells.
   It was not documented anywhere if not choosing basic spell elements at start would be gimping you.  After an hour of looking around I concluded that there was no way to "research" them later on. I may still be wrong, and still don't know.  This took away a lot of the fun factor.   

5: Luck/Start Balance.
    I think special resources should be weighed less compared to building choices you make.  Especially without proper info/documentation access, there are many paths to "gimped" that a start could proper a player to.  I had a dozed "soft" runs in the early game just to figure out the mechanics.  Fun factor down.

Final Thoughts:

It is clear the game was rushed to beat Civ5.  It is clear that not enough testing went into this to balance all of the mechanics and enrich the game with content.  It is clear that the paying public will be helping test/polish the game.  The game seems like many great ideas, some very well developed, others short, and all yet to fully work harmoniously together. I see 3 things happening.

1: The game bombs, Stardocks cuts its losses, it lives a crippled life only having hope in the modding community for a fraction of its potential audience.
    Stardocks reputation hurt badly.  I wont buy another game from them.

2: The game continues getting support from Stardock and in a year or two via major overhauls and expansions becomes a fun balanced content rich game that is many layers of development beyond its original.  This happend to Galactic Civ II, which I actually bought twice two years apart (lost my original copy in a move).
  But by then the games reputation would be too damaged to be enjoyed by most people.   

3: Stardock gets itself together in a hurry and musters some fast paced overnight development over the next week.  Get a robust in-house beta team to play endless games of it as you polish and develop mechanics and get a first round of some real balance work.  Get this out before the first round of reviews hit.  Then follow up with more polish and updates later.  As is - there are some heavy issues that need to be worked out fast and in house.  Do that, and you will get many customers for life.

Hope this helps you guys make the game better.