Birth of the Empires space TBS game (open source)

[Anonymissimus]

I'd like to get it working on my laptop, so I tried installing it on WINE but the botea7finalsetup.exe gives me an error "ERROR-13-0x80004002".

I can run it under wine with ubuntu trusty, never got such error. Only thing I always had to do is set up wine to use the GdiPlus.dll that ships with the game, otherwise there would be graphics problems (but it still runs). I do not install it however but execute the binary directly; I use the github checkout and an executable compiled under windows, this is the one you can download as the "development test version", so there's no need to compile yourself.

is there any chance of a native Linux client, even if I have to build from source?

Definitely not, because of using MFC. Compared to what wine does with other programs, it runs well with that.

Turn ends should not be slow, that is a new thing/bug I'd say. How long does a turn take? Does it get worse when getting to later turns in-game?

It gets worse and has always been like that. Depends on your hardware of course. Also on whether it's running under wine.
Strongly depends on how problematic you consider it, subjectively. If you look at the AI acting in wesnoth for instance, BotE is faster. Or look at the turn change in other global strategy games, e.g. freecol...there it is annoyingly slow.
We never had someone profiling the turn change.

disabling event screen is afaik not possible with in-game options but I could be wrong, I never tried to do so. Of course there is the source code open for everyone to change on github so if you want that feature that badly there is at least a way to do so.

That should be added to the existing option for disabling the random events event screens.