I will never play the campaing again.

There is a file in the Galciv-folder in 'my documents' that keeps track of where in the campaign you are. Maybe you deleted that file by mistake?
I know for a fact that simply deleting all of the save-game files won't have any effect on the campaign, I have done it myself.

I just make copies of my "My Games" folder and put them on another drive (in another folder would work, too, but the second drive provides better disk crash insurance). I rename the "My Games" copies to descriptive things like "My Arcean Game" or "mf keeps crashing try again next patch". Then, when I want to go back to an older game, I just rename folders and swap them out. This keeps both my savegames and my starships foldes from getting out of control. If I ever get around to trying the campaign, I'll make a copy just for camaign games.

Sort your files by file type before deleting your saves next time--the campaign save file has the .campaignsav file extension, whereas sandbox games have the .sav extension.

Hey, you could probably get back to where you were in an afternoon by playing the scenarios on Cakewalk. However long it takes to research Planetary Invasion and move a transport is how long it takes to win. Heck, even on Masochistic I've won five of the eight so far by October 2225.

Thanks for the symphaty

I have previously deleted files like this and never lost the campaing files. Iam positive that I did not delete them by accident. The save/load window had bunch of autosave files , couple campaing end game saves and couple others. Deleted those and "poof" the campaing was gone. Well as I said I was more suprised to sad by losing the campaing, maybe I´ll take Noumenon72 advice and play it again with CakeWalk.

Still one guestion lingers. Why do modern games tend to put stuff into the "my documents"? Seems to me bit stupid to have game files in two separate places or am I missing something?

I beat the campaign on masochistic in two days.. with a few restarts....

the starting over of research from the start each time just blew me away... not going to play it again for that reason and that reason alone

Still one guestion lingers. Why do modern games tend to put stuff into the "my documents"? Seems to me bit stupid to have game files in two separate places or am I missing something?

I really would like to know that too.

the starting over of research from the start each time just blew me away... not going to play it again for that reason and that reason alone

Well, they either have to do that or limit the technologies available to research in every mission to just a few.
Otherwise, there isn't anything stopping you from researching everything in the first mission.

Save games for the campaign are saved in the folder with the same name as the campaign.

You can load those from the Load Game window, and they will re-create the campaignsav file.

Still one guestion lingers. Why do modern games tend to put stuff into the "my documents"? Seems to me bit stupid to have game files in two separate places or am I missing something?

Because it makes sense to separate the game program from your save game data. When you uninstall a program you expect it to go away, leave nothing behind, just be gone. If your save game data is in the same folder as the game program, the folder can't be deleted.

There is also the issue that you might not want to make your kid, little brother, etc. an administrator of your machine. Writing to anything outside my documents requires a level of control over the computer you might not want to give to them (not neccessarily because you do not trust them, maybe just because so they can't accidently break something).

Definitely right on with the administrative control option - for those of us with multiple users on a machine there's also the fact that my saved games won't show up to be overwritten or deleted by another user who is playing on their login.

There's also the backup factor - many of us backup our My Docs folder often...our giant Games folders, not so much. I would love it if I could easily backup all my saved games from various programs without backing up the program files, but I hardly ever do because I don't want to wade through all of the individual games save folders one by one.

I think the main problem is that MS expected developers to adhere to their new model of folder management when they released the OS, and it hasn't happened that much. People probably wouldn't have these problems if *every* game saved into My Documents. We'd all be accustomed to managing that folder the way it was meant to. I'm happy Stardock at least is going this route.

>>the starting over of research from the start each time just blew me away... not going to play it again for that reason and that reason alone<< Well, they either have to do that or limit the technologies available to research in every mission to just a few. Otherwise, there isn't anything stopping you from researching everything in the first mission.

Also, I'm sure a campaign could be set with a turn time limit to losing the mission. Like if you don't beat the first mission in 1.5 years, the mission ends and a cutscene appears with a huge drengin fleet showing up and flattening your planet. You can only get so much research done then.

Still one guestion lingers. Why do modern games tend to put stuff into the "my documents"? Seems to me bit stupid to have game files in two separate places or am I missing something?

Because that is where Microsoft wants you to put them. There are certain versions of XP that do not allow non-admin users to write anywhere but there.