Heh, the Dwarf Fortress forums have a thread (up to 563 pages as of today) titled "Aurora: The Dwarf Fortress of 4x Games", which is where I learned of the game myself; quite a few folks from there post around here too, from what I've seen in my lurking. PCWorld also recently gave a rather favorable review to it, so the game should be getting a bit more exposure.
The only real fault I can find is the somewhat finicky installation and resolution issues, which I imagine stymies a lot of new users. Unfortunately there's apparently not much to be done about that other than starting from scratch (which, sometime after the Newtonian Aurora branch, is supposed to happen with Aurora II, which also has a subforum here).