Quick take:  The game seems to be on the right track, but it has several weaker areas in need of attention.

In more detail:  

1) The big problem facing all 4X games is that they bog down by the mid-game, and I think you have made moderate progress in addressing this.  At least on this map, the intensity early on is directed towards besting the neighbors, and at least at the moderate difficulties I was playing at, that was entirely doable, but it was fun.  Then, come mid-game, your immediate neighbors are weak... but distant nations are doing very well, score-wise.  And nothing about being the locally dominant nation ensures that you will automatically rack up the fame points to make winning automatic, that is a whole new challenge.  Furthermore, by whatever mechanism, the second ring of nations inevitably include 1-2 who want to go to war, which, in American football terms, provides a bit of a "pass rush" applying pressure so that you are not free to just do anything you want to accumulate points...  This is very good compared to other 4X games, but the cost is that we have this focus on "fame" which is a pretty abstract and gamey measure... but it IS something that AI seems reasonably good at pursuing, despite all the complex game systems in play.

2) Thus, the other traditionally big problem facing 4X games is addressed quite well.  The AI provides decent competition.  On the individual level, AI opponents are uneven, and often seem more bent on harming you than helping themselves.  But the group seems to always contain 1-2 decent competitors, which works fine.  And, above all, this "fame" thing is a goal that an AI can pursue, especially an AI fairly distant from you.

3) I really like your city/outpost/attached territory system.  It seems to work very well.

3) Assorted problems remain, however:

a) The elephant in the room involves naming.  It really, really does not work to have all your opponents re-naming themselves every era.  My personal solution would be to have your opponents have human names, and have those people adopt cultures each era.  Such that my neighbor is named Josephine, and at the start of the Classical era, I get a message: "Josephine has become an admirer or Roman culture."  And on the more detailed screen during the classical era, show it as

JOSEPHINE

  *Rome

  *Babylon

b) Similarly, place names...  I have seen this in other games, too, but it is mind-exploding to mix city names and territory names, with notifications sometimes referring to one, sometimes to the other.

c) Retreats are aggravating.  An overwhelming percentage of times, my retreats simply led to the enemy army immediately re-engaging with retreat no longer an option.  Yet many times, enemy retreats landed them in spots beyond my reach, often evading effective roadblocks.  Not sure what is going on with this.  

d) Maps are pretty to look at, but passable routes (due to elevation) are not very clear, and this is even more the case with that battle overlay in place.

e) Trade routes are routinely disrupted by violence.  This is a pretty big deal, but the working of this are murky.  Is this pure luck?  Is there something you can do to avoid the problem?  It appears you pay upfront for the trade route, and it continues indefinitely, until disrupted, with no further cost per turn, but even this is not clear to me.

f) Civics strike me as the weakest system in the game.  More than half of them, I find that I do not care, and even prefer things left undecided....  And considering how huge some of the other things are in the game, the impact hardly seems worth the time to think about it.

g) Generic icons on units seems like a pain

Also, your tutorial really needs information on zone of control rules, which are not at all typical, particularly as applied to moving directly away from a foe, or separated by an impassable cliff.  Tutorial also needs something about spheres of influence and tags like "thief."

Finally, a couple bugs or unintended situations:

a) Move ship into another nation's water, meet them for the first time, and leaving is an act of war

b) Every time I made a discovery, I was messaged that the world deed had been locked by another empire.

Thank you for the chance to play the game early, and good luck the rest of the way.

Don