DID I BUY AN ALPHA?

Nope its your system. Check your drivers.

Fill out a ticket and use the diagnostic tool on stardocks support page. 

I actually just updated my graphics driver 2 days ago... :/

Still does not explain the single-ship combat with all the others standing around...!

Please read some of the threads started by Frogboy on AI development.  They deal with your issues and many others.  There are more answers there then I can summarize.

Since I did buy the Alpha, I can tell you this is nowhere near that stage.  However, it is indeed part of a long range project headed by the CEO of the company.   He often states that getting to develop this AI is his primary motivation for producing the game.  As far as I can tell, this iterative process is how you produce an exceptional AI and there is no real way to compress the development cycle.  They could have held it in house for two years, but that is no way to capture the mass of experience that is in this community.  For now, you can either play the very functional AI  that exists right now, or you can pretend it is still in alpha, beta, whatever.  In two years or less, the AI is likely to be a new standard in gaming and be amazing.  We'll see.  It has an impressive start, for a youngling.  But you can play it whenever it's done to your liking.

It seems the rest of us are just too impatient for our own good. 

Um, I am not sure if this will help, but I run Windows on a Mac, and it's a Geforce card.  I ran into a LOT of visual problems as well, and they did greatly impact the game graphics on my machine.

What I found out is that there were two issues causing problems for me.  The first is that Windows has a power management setting that affects screen brightness and contrast.  I first had to STOP windows from auto adjusting this.  The setting is buried, so here is how to get to that setting on Windows 8.1.  The second issue is that Nvidia put color and contrast settings into their game software.

First, how to fix the auto color/brightness problem in Windows:

1) Open control panel.
2) Go into "power options" (you might need to display classic icons in control panel to get to this).
3) In power options, find your selected plan and click "change plan settings".
4) In the settings screen click on "changed advanced power settings".
5) Navigate to Display/Display Brightness and make sure it's set to 100%.
6) In that same screen, turn "enable adaptive brightness" to OFF.

So now, windows shouldn't be mucking with your settings and you can start to adjust the colors manually.

Next, you have to go into the nvidia control panel.  First, make sure you have the latest Geforce experience software set up on your system, or you might not be able to find these settings!

1) Click the small /\ arrow button next to the clock in your lower right corner.  This should pop up a window displaying your taskbar apps.
2) Right click on the Nivdia icon, and then left click on "Open Nvidia control panel".
3) In the Nvidia control panel, open up the display branch and go to "adjust desktop color settings".
4) Click the "Use Nvidia settings" radio button.
5) Adjust all the settings to something that looks good to YOU.

Now that you have done all that, NOW go into the game.  See how it looks.  If it still doesn't fit the bill, you can make adjustments in the game to adjust the brightness and contrast.

It LOOKS to me like you have your contrast set up WAY too high and that's why you are getting that large white streak through your game UI.

The important thing is to make sure your Windows and Nivida settings look GOOD before you go into the game.  I'd recommend finding a detailed desktop background of a natural or city scape with lots of colors and contrast so that you can hone in in the right settings.  Then, just tweak it a bit in game.

Hope this helps and NO, you didn't buy an alpha. 

I actually get the same "beams of light" issue when I reload a lot.  Obviously you save scum at times too.  

Just restart the game and it goes away.  Not a big deal.  Didn't bother posting it as a bug because there are bigger issues to fry. 

Restarting helped (after the thing crashed), but there are some screens that still have this after a few loads... didn't notice which ones....

Are the ships in a fleet.

Is there enough logistics points to  hold all the ships.

Sounds like you have ships stacked instead of in a fleet.

I'd recommend starting a support ticket with the information found in the troubleshooting guide.

https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/default_import/Knowledgebase/Article/View/496/161/general-galactic-civilizations-iii-troubleshooting