Like I said, it isn't going to be for everyone. Personally, I've always enjoyed the combination of turn-based empire management and real-time combat myself (part of the reason I'm a fan of the Total War series), but that's me.
The developer was also careful to keep to a pretty tight design and limit feature creep, which I respect. It does lead to a 4x that feels like it might be a bit more focused on combat and war (rather like SotS) than is normally my cup of tea, but at least it knows what kind of game it wants to be.