Ok..I have 2 kinda big problems here..at least in my opinion they are. The first was found out by accident while the second was a result of the first.

The first big issue pertains to a possible multiplayer cheat.

I had landed a colony ship on a planet and received one of the planetary bonus options. I played a few extra turns and had to quit for a while. Not thinking, I quit the game without saving it. When I came back and loaded the game I was a couple turns prior to landing my colony ship..so when I got back to that point and landed I received a different planetary bonus.

So I wondered if I did it again what might happen. So I reloaded and tried again and didn't receive any planet bonus...so I tried again and again and kept getting various bonuses. Eventually the game locked up..see the next big issue.

In single player I could care less what a player might want to do...but in multiplayer, what is going to prevent someone from saving the game and relanding colony ships until a very favorable bonus comes up..like 46% research..or 49% production? I can see the fists flying over this one

The second issue occured as a result of reloading the save game time and time again. When I first start a scenario that I might want to play again I always save it. So for the record, the starting savegame I am using required 5,616 kb.

As a reference, I have everything set to abundant, on a gigantic scattered galaxy with all 9 AI players on a very hard setting using a P4 3.4 with 2 gigs of ram and a X800 256 all with current drivers.

After playing to where I have around 15 or so colonies I notice the savegame file grew to 10,929 kb. This is the point that I started to reload to reland my colony ship. After the first landing and reloading (without going to a new turn), the save file grew to 16,043 kb.

The second landing and reloading caused it to go to 21,152 kb and after the third reloading the file grew to 26,274. This last one took over 5 minutes to save so I could check the file.

It's not the saving that is causing the problem but the reloading, since this problem started with just reloading the savegame file over and over without advancing a turn. I will try and eliminate some other variables, but I typically use the escape key to access the option screen rather than the menu tab. I'm not sure if this matters, but I kinda doubt it.

The game file appears to be growing with each reloading by just about the size of the original save game file. Again I don't know if this is coincidence or not. I'll try a different size game and see if it happens. Eventually though the game locks up or crashes to desktop because the file is too huge.

Hopefully all this helps.

Sabre21