Not too surprised, actually.  Day Two reviews can get pretty brutal as people get upset for not getting X/Y/Z/A/B/C, even if Y/Z/B/C were never promised/part of the game.  But if the game is good (or what was problematic gets fixed), it should bump back up over the days/weeks/months.

I think under 80% is a pretty fair result for how the game is.  I'm surprised that Meta has it at 86% to be honest.  It's a good game, but not great.

This is one of the big reasons that Steam needs to have a "sliding window" average for reviews, especially for Early Access.  Reviews more than 1-2 months old should be excluded from the ratings.  Even for released games, I'd show nothing more than 6 months back in terms of reviews, because, let's face it, reviews of games long after patches have been released are pretty much useless in terms of telling me whether or not I should buy a game NOW.

Or, if Steam could manage it, reviews should show 1 month prior to the last UPDATE (of any kind) to the present. That would be both fair and informative.

That's a great point.  Perhaps Steam should delete beta reviews after game release.  Or at least segregate them in some way.  I mean lets get real; 1.0 is so different in terms of AI,balance, polish,stability, etc. than beta 6 to say nothing of beta 1.  It is not really fair to compare.

During early access, it was at 62% until Beta 6 where it crawled up to 79%. Then during the last week it made it past 81%.

These sorts of things are always subjective. We all care about different things in our games.  

By the end of early access, crash reports had gotten so infrequent that more time wouldn't have mattered. I know some people will object to me saying this but GalCiv III, 1.0, out the door, is as stable as any other 1.0 in my experience over the past 20 years.  

I can think of major, well known, 4X games and well known games that shipped where you couldn't possibly finish a game.  That's the nature of PC development. Everyone has different boxes.  On our boxes, the game is rock solid. It's when you get out there and someone has a sound driver or a configuration we didn't take into account that things get strange.  

Not to mention, the game has so many different options that unless people wanted us to nerf the game experience, there's going to be some rough edges.  Look how many people complained about MP not supporting custom races during the first week without people considering the significance that they can, right out of the box, create truly custom civilizations both visually and functionally. 

Anyway, what should happen is that 1.01 will come out and it should feel a lot better for those players experiencing issues.

Very good points Frogboy.  Despite the crashes i continue to see, i totally agree and am getting many hours in.  I was one of those that voiced concern about your release because i was worried about the review fallout.  I had faith you would be patching often (Monday for 1.01?).  Thanks for a great game so far, your support of us players (not many in your position would be doing what you are)  and a general hats off to your whole team.

It's a lot more polished than Civ V was at release.  It took two major expansions for Civ V to become a great game, GCIII already is a great game, it just needs a polish.

Besides often a bad review is simply because a game doesn't feature some detail that a player wants, it's entirely subjective. It doesn't mean it's not a fantastic game.