As others have exhaustively gone over the rules and such, this review will be more about our impressions of the game.

I'm writing this after 2 sessions now (having not gotten around to it yet!), the first a learning game with my wife and the other last week with my wife again and 3 new players. Both games went pretty well aside from the learning/teaching aspect, but even then everyone seemed to pick up on the concepts pretty well (almost no rule drool!) and to a person everyone proclaimed liking the game afterwards. My wife and I on the way home even discussed various strategies and how the game went.

As to the rules, I had read the rulebook before and explained it to my wife and after that first play, went through the FAQs and questions here to clear up some of the trickier points. I can't say we played true to the rules completely the first time through but pretty close, the second was about 90% dead on, mostly the only thing missed was I think everyone forgot about the possibility of slash and burn tactics. Against popular concern, I really had no problems with the rulebook itself, finding it well stocked with illustrations and examples. I suppose the only 'problem' I might express is that the at 44 pages, finding an answer to a specific question can be a little trying, perhaps in subsequent printings an index would help.

Things we liked:
Overall, most aspects of the game appealed to everyone. I didn't hear any specific complaints from folks about anything. One of the 'trickiest' things to pick up in the 5 person game appeared to be the planning (the whole reverse order thing was tricky for the first timers... my wife and I had a distinct advantage here having played the game before and gotten a taste of it though we still made mistakes here). The other was building. For some reason the clear progression of events for a build order was a struggle nearly every time. Even my wife, having had played before, kept confusing research with build.

Combat was a bit muted in the initial game but completely insane in the second, one pair of players having had traded planets and bases twice inside of 4 turns! See review title.

Things we didn't like:
As far as the game itself went, no one had any specific complaints really. I think the worst thing about it in everyone's mind was that the time it took to learn was not short. Being a fairly detailed game there was a big risk of the aforementioned rule drool as well, but luckily this didn't seem to happen in either session.

I like to think that I'm decently able to distill games down to 'what you need to know to play' fairly effectively and push as much learning off to actual play as possible, but as there were so many unfamiliar 'bits' to the game, just the explanation of what was what took quite some time. No one else had played the computer game either so it was the double whammy of being unfamiliar with the components and unfamiliar with the source material.

Session 1:
There were a couple of problems with this first one rule-wise, unsurprising with the level of detail of the game. We didn't use mobilize as fluidly as we could have and there was still a hard to shake concept of 'my planet/your planet.'

Initially I had pulled a planet with a 2 conquest point spot and another with a 1. My wife had only pulled a 1 conquest planet and a resource world. With only 4 worlds everything connected to everything else. This was where the 'my planet/your planet' thing came into play, where my wife didn't quite grasp that just because I laid the 1 conquest point planet there was nothing stopping her from attacking/claiming it. As such, I was raking in 3 CPs a turn to her one and managed to win by victory points in 6 turns (we both had special victory wins that turn and it was Stage III).

Funny enough, out of 4 combats in that session, I lost all but one (thankfully, I won the one to get my base back!). Her army was much more powerful than mine so really I won by her lack of familiarity with the rules and tactics.

Session 2:
To reiterate, 3 new players with no previous exposure (to even the general idea of RTS games) involves a lot of teaching/learning up front. Interestingly enough, though she hadn't played Starcraft the computer game and wasn't familiar with the units, my wife loves RTS games and found it fairly easy to apply the concepts of those (gathering resources, building times, etc) to the board game. No such luck with the others! 

During board setup, I did manage to finagle an extremely good position that, in a way, actually allowed me to turtle a little bit. I do not expect this to be a common occurrence in any way and mostly just got lucky with the z-axis placements. I was able to gradually expand outward over the 4 turns, setting up buffers to my little kingdom that would be time-consuming to penetrate (this is where the planning advantages from playing before really helped with blocking advancement into my area).

My wife was nowhere near me and, without having to fight through at least 1 other person, couldn't get to me at all. The person/barrier in this case was one of the sharper minds in our groups and without meaning to intimidated my wife just by being there!

The other two people where extremely aggressive throughout the game and as such, had some incredible swings of fortune, trading planets, bases and being exceptionally mobile. I'm not sure how effective this was, but it was amusing as hell to watch (well, until one of them started hitting one of my buffers while the wife's 'barrier' was hitting the other!).

At the end of turn 4 it was Stage III and my wife and I had both completed our Special Victory conditions. I managed to win 8 points to 6, bloody close that! Her argument was that as I was mostly teaching/coaching rules I was subconsciously discounted as a player. I could accede to that and the fact that I had an almost perfect starting location. As she actually had to fight for her position and I mostly just colonized, I almost feel like she's right!

Almost

As a note, one of the girls was also more or less brand-new to this level of complexity in a game and enjoyed herself quite a bit so I think we can safely welcome a new convert!

The Summary:
We all liked the game. Personally I love it. No one seemed to have any major trouble with the rules and the combat, which I was thinking would be the tricky point, is apparently a lot more intuitive and easier to pick up than I expected it to be, even for a player unused to this type of game. Planning was understandably a bit tricky and building surprisingly so! The second play really opened up some of the tactical possibilities for me, though this could've also been attributed to my coaching 3-4 other people throughout and thus getting deeper into the guts of it.

This is my only 10-rated game.