I pre-ordered this game to get into the beta on a lark... I can't say I've been dissapointed by much.
It really feels to me like the best of Homeworld and the best of GalCiv II in one. It's like the best of space opera...
But some points I want to bring up.
The tutorial says that the majority of your forces will be made up of frigates and cruisers. In my experiance, this is not so; a single capital warship, upgraded from the beginning of the game, has proven itself to be worth many, many times it's cost in frigates and cruisers. This is, I think, not a bad thing; Frigates are pickets, and more than anything else they create lag. I think they should be discouraged after the early game. Plus, it gives rise to epic tales of warship fleets marauding through enemy space, wreaking havoc seemingly at will, but when one of them gets close to being destroyed you really start to angst over it's imminant demise.
I like the jump-node system. It reminds me, more than anything, of how the Terran ships move in the game Sword of the Stars; that game's failing was in scope. It got the big picture right, but it was too coarse-grained to really get into it.
A few things that do puzzle me, though. First and foremost, the Jump Drive relic. What does it do? From it's tooltip, I initially believed it freed my ships from the node system altogether - this would be a huge boon! Freedom of mobility would be an incredible boon! But... Nope. So then I re-read it, and it seemed to suggest you could fly to any star from anywhere - this would, while not being as liberating as my first idea, still be a very useful thing on the stragic level, if not the tactical. But not only did it not seem to do that, but it seemed to do nothing.
Which, interestingly enough, has led to my first idea for the game, which is actually compounded.
The first part is that fully researching the jump drive relic should free your ships from the node pathway. Anywhere to anywhere, though of course they still have to leave and enter plentary gravity wells like other ships. This would give those who controlled the Jumpdrive relic a huge advantage in terms of mobility, but it would not give them too great an advantage on the tactical scale.
The second idea I had is that there should be star systems disconnected from the node grid. Completely disconnected, such that the only way to reach them is by finding and exploiting the Jump Drive relic. This would of course pose a great strategic advantage; if nothing else, if all else was failing, he who controlled the jump drive could simply retreat to these systems and cut of all ties with the old system - all ties, that is, except one. Obviously, the Jump Drive relic should be connected to the node grid by fiat; if that system falls, and the jumpdrive gets engineered by another race, the cat is, as they say, out of the bag, and the isolationist is now in deep kimchee.
And finally, one thing that bugged me was that there were no tech-tree options to expand Logistics or Tactical support for systems. I think those absences were sorely missed.
