I actually like the combat part. Maybe I'm just not seeing what other people don't like so far. Haven't had enough experience with the war system to have an opinion on that.
Here's what my test game to try things out looks like nine years in:
The red is an empire that appears to be one of the 'advanced AI' starts. They snagged Alpha Centauri, which has the closest colonizable world, with a frontier outpost before I could get to it. The green on the right, who I'll probably end up allying with against the other one, got the next-closest one(Goffia and Yillion systems). I'm trying to get a frontier outpost up in the space between them, where I had to take out a couple groups of mining drones to even be in business. AI is clearly better than in the early stream builds, and I'm rather enjoying the fact that -- partly due to a crappy starting spot -- they are pushing me around quite a bit here at the start.
Haven't seen anything yet to convince me that I'm not going to be binge-playing this for a very long time.