I just finished a game that went over 500 turns and ended with a technology victory and I thought I would give a few observations and suggestions:

1. I encountered the previously described situation where the game gets stuck on an opponent's turn and the way to "unstick" it is to hit the "Esc" button then select the "Resume" option.  This happened many times and seemed to happen when it was the turn of one or the other of 2 specific opponents of the 16 total opponents.
2. I encountered the previously described hang where the only thing you can do is save the game, exit, restart the game, and reload the last save.  EVERY time this happens I can go immediately to the planet where I was ejecting transports and there will be 1 transport still in the planet (the others will have been successfully ejected).  The logic that ejects transports is very inconsistent:
   1. sometimes it populates the transports and ejects them without asking me to select the citizens to populate the transports
   2. sometimes the dialog to populate each transport will have preselected a citizen for me to approve (always the citizen that previously populated the transport)
   3. sometimes the dialog to populate each transport will make me select the citizen to populate the transport
   4. Sometimes the dialog does not appear for all of the transports being ejected which will leave one transport still on the planet.  For example, if I invaded with 8 transports and then click on the "Eject" button, at the start of the next turn the dialog sometimes only appear for 7 of the 8 transports.
3. The game does not make it easy to deal with multiple occurrences of the same action.  For example:
   1. As I got farther into the game, I wanted a shipyard to schedule 10 "Treasure Hunt" missions, but there is not a simple way to schedule multiple instances of the same thing.  This applies to everything you can schedule in a shipyard.
   2. I wanted a world to schedule 10 "Economic Stimulus" tasks, but there is no way to do that except to SLOWLY click on the "Economic Stimulus" button 10 times (each click takes 1 - 2 seconds before the button can be successfully clicked again).
   3. At the end/beginning of a turn, if there are multiple occurrences of the same thing, you have to click your way through each one of them instead of getting one dialog that shows the total results of ALL of the same events.  For example,
      1. multiple treasure hunters finding credits
      2. multipler contract traders finding resources
4. When a research project is completed, the dialog showing that appears first with a button to select the next research, but you cannot do anything with it until all other dialogs showing the results of other activities (anomolies, traders, etc.).  It would be  better to delay the display of the dialog for the research completion and make it the last dialog that is displayed.
   1. As an idea, you may want to collect all of the end of turn and beginning of turn events, aggregate the ones that can be aggregated, prioritize the dialogs to be displayed, then display them in a logical sequence.
5. When an opponent attacks one of your ships or planets, it is not obvious that this has occurred.  Yes, the display does move to each location where combat took place, but it moves to each of the locations very quickly and it is difficult to see and understand what happened at each location.  It might be a good idea if, at the beginning of your turn, the game took you to each location where combat occurred and displayed a dialog describing what happened.  This would allow you to see what happened and where it happened, then you could click on a button on the dialog to continue when you were ready.
6. I support the comments that have already been made that there needs to be something like the old technology tree.  It is extremely difficult to figure-out which technologies you need to research first to get to the technology you really want (hull size technologies, logistic expansion technologies, etc.).
7. I probably shouldn't mention this, but I found an interesting hack related to Prototype ships like the Retribution.  There is only supposed to be one instance of these ships and, once they are destroyed, they are supposed to be gone forever.  However, I found that once a Prototype ship becomes available for you to produce, you can go into the Ship Designer and that Prototype ship appears in the list of known ship designs (on the left side of the screen).  If you select the Prototype ship, you can then click on the "New Design" button and get a new starting ship design that is based on the Prototype ship.  You can then modify this design to improve it if you want and then save it as a new ship design.  You can save many variations of the Prototype ship design if you want.  Next, you can go into as many of your shipyards as you want and schedule as many of these new ship designs as you want.  The only limiting factor that I have found is that, once one of the ships based on the Prototype design has been produced, you can no longer schedule any more of any of the derived designs at any shipyard.  However, all of the scheduled ships will be produced.  This allows you to build many fleets of powerful ships.  This hack is especially valuable early in the game when you can produce many Retribution-like medium hull ships before you have even been able to research small hulls to say nothing about medium hulls.  You may want to fix this by not including Prototype ships is the list of available ship designs in the Ship Designer.

That's all for now other than to say that the game is getting better and better with each new release.  Keep working on the things that people are suggesting and you should have a great game when it finally releases in it's final form.