I bought into the early alpha access and have put in about 30 hours. Right now the art of what is implemented is there and it looks impressive. Learning the game and each race you should feel pretty good and it definitely has more to do than AoW3 even at this early stage. However, once you put in the time and you figure out a good build order and expansion balance, this game will quickly be very easy and boring to play. Right now by the time you get into the 2nd tech tree, you can create two armies and just go rampage the AI.
When this goes live, or as it develops, however some things are going to have to happen to make this even worthy of comparing it to Civ 5. The aggressive AI is admittedly not implemented yet, but it will need to consistently challenge the player. Currently there are no victory conditions other than military dominations, something that will change. Currently there are no settings that increase the difficulty at all. You can barely get through the middle of the tech tree before the game ends on turns.
Another problem that good players will struggle with is the differences between the races. When you first start they are huge differences. Broken lords do not use food at all and rely on dust. Necrophages have to kill to get food. Others get science bonuses. However, when you get to the point where you are good at this game, the differences between the races merely alter where you focus your population at each stage of the game. The differences are really minor at best. The quests and goodie huts get stale and repetitive as you play a lot of this game as well. Hoping that the minor factions play a bigger role as time goes on.
If you are used to a Civ 5 type game, where you use the terrain, leader and terrain type to gauge what victory condition you're going to go for..... this is going to be disappointing to you at this stage and the potential is still probably going to fall short. However, some things are going to be much better than Civ 5, such as the ability to create custom units using any of the basic (or assimilated) unit types. There are some terrible balance issues right now (i.e. ranged units dominate currently), but you can equip your units with serious fire power (at a cost, however). The map turns into your battlefield and the manual combat, when implemented properly, has the potential to make the strategy of moving about the map just as important as the battle itself. In civ 5 the game is won or lost in the first two eras. This game, however, picks up steam and has a lot of better late game potential if it didn't end so early.
Micromanagement is a 4x "flaw." In civ 5 worker and population management can be a downside for some. The same is true for this game. Standard exploits are present already where if a building/research project is one turn away, you literally have to go into the city and move population from production to another area so you can take advantage of the 1 turn bonus in that other area from moving them. THEN, once the project is completed, you have to move the population back. This gets tiresome when you have over 5 cities, and this game (unlike civ 5) benefits from as many cities as you can manage without going into rebellion.
I can definitively say this is already better than AoW3. But I can also say that it will never have the depth of Civ 5. Time will tell whether they get close enough to make it worth a fraction of the 1000+ hours I've already put into Civ.