How do we know to pre-order?

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.

Usually the very first beta in Stardock products are to test the range of systems that can run the game.  So once the first beta is out the specs should start locking down on what it can run on.

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.

Yes, but didn't they say they wanted to make it so the game could be played entirely from the cloth map in order to allow super-low-end systems to run the game smoothly?

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.

I'm hoping it will work, I have not been so interested in a game since Medieval 2 Total War (see https://forums.elementalgame.com/341966 for the end result of that interest )

If your listening Developer Gods, allow it to run on my laptop. Include options to turn all eye candy off, even offer a .BMP sprite mode if you have to.

Thankyou

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 have Dominions 3 and I agree, its a fine piece of work. I wrote about it in the "Greatest Finds" (https://forums.elementalgame.com/342006) forum page.

I really enjoy the work of the game developers who make these great games. The making of games is an artistic pursuit and when you get good art it is appreciated. I especially liked Dom3 for the storytelling in my head that went along with each unique god teamed up with each different civ. A psychic inanimate Obelisk commanding armies across the land, or an Old Crone with vast magic skills, or a Ghost King. Interestingly, excluding summons, each civs units were all available right from the start, there is no tiers of units. Thats pretty unique to games these days, and it works in Dom3.

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.