I bought the original in a Steam Sale, and I spend most of the time designing ships, and sending them (quite unsuccessfully I 'm afraid 🙂 ) in battle. Since I prefer the switch to "taking turns" instead of "real time", Stardrive II may become a very solid entry in the 4x genre. 

I find that I also strongly prefer turn-based to real-time, Stardrive was one of the things that helped me realize that.  (Sins of a Solar Empire is a weird and very special exception [Where's Sins II Stardock?  If Ironclad won't do it, find somebody else.  That's what everybody really wants, nobody cares about large-scale Starcraft clones...].)

Actually, one of the things I found most severely lacking in Stardrive was interesting colony management and domestic empire building.  This issue also caused Distant Worlds to be terrible (well, the UI was by far the worst issue) and Endless Legend to be fantastic, despite DW looking so much more appealing from a distance.  The screens they are showing here look like an improvement, but it's hard to draw conclusions from them.