To start with, I am running the game with "--software-ui" which resolves a problem I had were it refuses to load the game whilst showing a black screen that steam overly comically works on. After that, it sort of works: the menu shows up without issue and the game starts. I launched the tutorial and that is were the first problem happened. It decided to overlay the intro video (which was glitchy at best) on the game for about a minute before the intro disappeared to only the game. I then tried restarting the game and played the second tutorial, or at least tried to, what I ran into was that it would not let me build anything, and when I clicked to place a building it would show the yellow circle as if I had no building selected but it very clearly was ghosted to show that I could place it there. And also, every time I quit to the main menu or galactic warfare screen it was black (with sound though) and thus forced me to restart.
The quitting causing a black screen is unfortunately a known bug with PA that has been around for a long time. You don't need to quit and restart though. Resizing the window or switching between full screen and windowed and back fixes it too. Anyway, are you running on Mac or Linux? And with version or distro? Is this on Intel, NVidia or AMD drivers? An in case of NVidia or AMD on Linux, are you using the open source or proprietary drivers?
OK, so I do not know for sure why it works magically now without software ui, but my best guess is that I had made it fullscreen when I gained access to the UI. And without software-ui I am able to build and returning to the main menu does not yield a black screen. So basically it is working for now at least. If this helps at all, I am on Linux (Antergos) with intel and nvidia (proprietary). Also the original black screen was when the game was loading, and there was no sound with that, software UI allowed me to enable fullscreen and now it just works.
