At some point it will get officially supported. And it is not just about professional developers, in fact, amateur developers tend to be most Linux friendly. It is the amateurs who need to pave the way for the professionals.

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Aliens are indeed one of the reasons: Having to spread your defenses when the aliens become aggressive makes it harder to survive them. That is, however, not the main reason. The main reason why expanding too fast is counterproductive, is because of the way your population grows: Let's assume you have 10 units of population. If you spread them over 2 cities of size 5 each, then you need to construct twice as much buildings to make them productive (farms, factories, labs) as when you would have a single city of size 10. Therefore, in Pandora you want to delay constructing cities.

At some point however:
* You will run out of habitat
* You produce too much polution in a city
* Or you want to use a strategic resources on the map

Only when that happens, it makes sense to construct a second city. Migration of population to the new city is automatic in the new city and is affected by the amount of habitat, polution, and morale in the city.

So.. in Civilization, constructing cities makes your population generally grow faster. In Pandora this is not the case, you grow faster by having a limited amount of cities, enough to provide sufficient habitat for your citizens.

You don't want to spend too much time on constructing civilian buildings such as factories, because you need an army. Keeping your army strong enough is more important in Pandora than in Civilization, because of alien agression and the AI: The AI plays to win and if you become an easy appetite, the AI will decide to go to war. Therefore an underdeveloped army will quickly lead to loosing the game.

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Pandora uses its own TCP/IP based client/server architecture for multiplayer and does not depend on external middleware for it. I own the Matrix Games version and can perfectly have multiplayer games with people that own the Steam version. I have never heard of a dependency on Galaxy. Therefore, while I can't confirm for sure, it would really surprise me if the GOG version would do anything else.

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While Pandora is clearly inspired by Alpha Centauri, the way you need to play it is very different. In Civilization derived games, like AC, but also beyond Earth like games you need to build as many cities as possible in a short period of time after starting the game. In Pandora, such strategies don't work, are even counter productive, and in order to be succesfull, you need to develop yourself a different strategy in order to win the game. The Pandora approach to a well known gameplay problem, the stack of death, is for example also very different: Instead of forbidding stacks, the developers found a more structural solution to make them ineffective (stacks are very vulnerable to enemy artillery).

Conclusion: It is inspired by Alpha Centauri, but it is a very different game. The gap between Civilization and Beyond Earth is much smaller than the gap between Beyond Earth and Pandora. Many BE players consider this a big improvement. Further in the eyes of many, BE has a few fundamental flaws, while the gameplay in Pandora works. That is not to say Pandora has no flaws, on the contrary, but the basics of turn based strategy gameplay, the set of rules, work pretty well.

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You forgot to mention the AI: The latest versions of the game (that you only get with Eclipse of Nashira) have a an AI that is so good that it has to be penalized up until medium difficulty level in order to give human players a chance. It is therefore a really good game for advanced 4X players: You will be slaughtered and you will need to learn how to play against the AI. Lot's of fun gaming hours guaranteed.

I did contribute the Dutch translation of the game.

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I got it and its definately the worst "big" expansion of all. Being able to do clean industry feels like a quick and dirty solution, almost a cheat, so you no longer deal with pollution problems. If dealing with polution was too hard we would need a gameplay solution, not just some building that you build or specialization that you select and problem gone.

I bought it, but it worsens the gameplay, so I may uninstall it once I am done with the scenario's that it adds.

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Often these develoeprs need a little helping hand, so I did offer it. Unity does the work of making it run, but developers are often inexperienced. Once they see that releasing Linux is no magic, things move towards a release.

It is indeed true that the Linux version is in the main branch and therefore everyone that owns the game has access to the Linux beta. Considering that no Linux specific bugs have been found, I don't think a lot will change when it becomes official.

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The data is in all likelood not the right Linux market share, but also a real sample from lots of real websites. And... it's not just a single number that is off, there is a clear trend visible. Therefore we should consider this highly relevant, something very important is happening for Linux. Part of it migth be ChromeOS, but looking at sites that count both separately, traditional Linux is still bigger than ChromeOS. Might be some countries kicking out American products. Maybe we should try to contact Netmarketshare for an explanation.

Personally I encounter Linux desktops much more often than Mac desktops.

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I'm a bit skeptical: This game is not limited by the number of things you can build in your city. In fact there is plenty of stuff you can build (and there is the Workshop). Therefore the fact that there will be 350 new assets doesn't really excity me.

IMO a very important weak point is that at some point, usually if you exceed 50000 citizens or something, the game becomes much less challenging. You always have plenty of money at that point, have build most of the infrastructure of the city and the remaining game is just build more of the same and wait and see. It becomes boring. I think Colossal Order should focus on addressing this and possibly other weaknesses of the game, rather than just giving people more stuff to build.

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Valve must be involved here for two reasons: First, Valve have been working hard on the AMDGPU drivers. The only explanation is if they have business interrest in that. Second, Atari needs games. Who has thousands of Linux games? Valve.

Therefore my interpretation of this is that this is simply a new Steam Machine. I have always been suspecting Valve, with there long-term plans, were silently working on the Steam Bomber, and that it would use a custom AMD APU. Things seem to be coming together now.

The fact that Atari is involved also means that a game publisher commits its future to Linux.

Very, very good news.

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