I spoke to Paul this morning and personally told him I Stardock has nothing to fear from Sid Meirer's Starships game.
Well I'm glad you settled that for them.
Anyway, my understanding was that Starships was supposed to play more like XCOM than it was supposed to play like Civilization, even though it's borrowing from the Civ BE universe.
Whether it succeeded or failed to do that, or to be entertaining I won't comment, but let's try to not compare it to things it's not even trying to be, like GC3 or Civ.