long wait to start game?

I've not heard anyone report that before. Have you tried starting the game while your internet is online? Maybe it does want to authenticate your install once, but can't, so it is hanging. Wild guess.

I've got always-on DSL, so that shouldn't be an issue. I play behind a NATing firewall, so that might be an issue.

I have also experienced this. I started seeing it with Beta 2. At first, I thought that perhaps DirectX was to blame, but installing the latest & greatest version of DirectX did not resolve. I have since upgraded my video card to double the memory I had before (now 128 MB), but the problem persists. I had hopes that Beta 3 would fix it, but it has not. Any ideas for troubleshooting this?

The rest of my specs are P4 2.5 GHz w/ 512 MB RAM. The video card is an Nvidia. I forget the exact model, but I can look it up if relevant.

With regards to this happening because of a license or internet check, I ran a packet sniffer in the background, while starting the game. It found zero network traffic. I don't believe that is the cause of the delay.

Disabling the internet check didn't help, at least not in my case.

Well I did say "wild guess"

I likewise have suffered this issue. For me it is always a 2 minute wait plus or minus a few seconds. (Yes I was anal and timed it).

Oh, I understand wild guesses. I'm just wondering. Many of my posts lately have started while I was waiting for GC2 to start up (largely because the "Next Turn" button keeps going awol, but I'm willing to put up with it as long as it doesn't go awol on the first use. This is a beta test, and I'm mostly using it as an excersise to find out how to break things, now to baby things so that they don't break, etc. Kind of a "wonder what happens if I poke it with a stick" experience

The internet check option on the options screen refers to the metaverse code, which is not currently active.  A more accurate check to see if it's something internet related would be to try turning off your firewall.