Well, it's an alpha, so it's not really comparable yet. It's safe to say that it lacks some "probably expected" featured.

I don't know about now, but when I tried it a month ago, it lacked an options menu. Clicking "options" on the main menu opened a dialog with placeholder text. Maybe they've added one now, but I didn't see one skimming the updates list.

There is now a neat options menu with all kinds of the obvious settings you would want to change. even some graphics things, though most of them seem to be for water haha.

This is a very hard question to answer, because this genre tends to one game per player, just because the games take forever (a civilization 5 multiplayer game tends towards 10 hours), and this nature leads to a lack of game changing.

This game is an RTS (like Starcraft/Warcraft). It's not a Simulation like SimCity or Civ. Matches are meant to be played with 2 or more players and can last a few hours max depending on the map. With that said, my brother and I love it. RTSes for Mac have been lacking and this one is really solid even in Alpha. We can't wait until it gets more mature and modders get a chance to make mods on top of the already great core.