I would recommend waiting if you're worried that it won't run well. If you really want to participate in the beta, if you wait long enough I suspect Stardock will release recommendation system specifications shortly before the beta goes live. If you're not satisfied with that (is it could change between beta and release), then I would suggest just waiting until later betas or the final version. From my experience, when Stardock says "minimum requirements" they mean "minimum requirements to play the game smoothly and comfortably, albeit at lower graphical settings."

But right now, considering Stardock is just going into its first internal alpha, I don't think even they have a good idea of what the final system requirements will be.

Well, I don't know if that'll be the case this time. The first beta is supposed be just the cloth map, so I wouldn't expect it to be a good gauge of system requirements.

People with dilemma's like the OP describes also need to consider the history of GalCiv2, which definitely had an audience of folks playing on sub-spec machines with few to no complaints. I was one of them, and even though I now have hardware that can support most of the eye candy, I still spend most of my playing time outside the 3D zoom levels that are most demanding of graphics resources. Faster game loads and turn processing is pretty nice, though. I used to be able to do things like start loading a game and get a big load of dishes washed before the game was ready to play.

Hello  MichaelCook...   I recommend trying the Dominions_3 demo while you're waiting:

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/DOM3/DOM3_page.html

I recommend your first game be played on a large map with only a few players since the game has lots of depth.   It's possible to also choose where your units stand on the battlefield and what battle orders they will follow.  The official game has over 2000 types of units.   Hope you like the game.  

I'm actually hoping that this will run on my 2.5GHz laptop.  (I don't remember the video card, which tells you how bad it is.  I know its an nvidea chipset, but I don't recall what. It doesn't support pixel shader 2)  MoM and a few other dos box games are about all I run on it right now, avoiding games like warcraft or starcraft because I usually don't have a real mouse. 

Of course, if the combat in this is totally real time (they said it can be played turn based) then I'd have to autoresolve or something, but that is how it goes.