The current save/load mechanism of GalCiv is perhaps its greatest flaw. Not only does it add a layer of confusion and frustration to what is otherwise a fantastic game, it also limits strategic choices of the player and narrows his options considerably. This phenomenon stems from several bugs and questionable game designs. Some issues I would like to point out here are:

* The research progress indicator bug forces players to save and reload their game every turn if they wish to minimize waste.

* Sector influence is reset upon game loading, making it nearly impossible to pursue cultural conquest if you do not have hours of time to spend on each game session.

* Load times can increase to excruciating lengths towards the end game on larger maps. Although this may seem to be a result of more units and colonies, I suspect it is also a consequence of AI routines being processed upon loading a game. In other words, instead of just loading the ships and colonies to display them on the map, the game also re-calculates the strategy and tactics of each AI. The amount of time consumed by this task then increases exponentially as more ships and colonies must be taken into consideration.

* Diplomatic actions are more likely to occur upon game loading since the AI routines seem to be processed at this time. In fact, they are almost guaranteed to occur later in the game. This puts the player at a severe disadvantage since the AIs are very likely to trade behind his back every time the game loads. By simply saving and loading a game repeatedly and examining the “debug.err” file each time, I have been able to trigger over a dozen diplomatic transactions within one turn. The only reason I stopped counting at a dozen was because I had already spent half an hour of my time just saving and loading the game and I could not tolerate it anymore. If I had persevered, I have no doubt the technology gap between the AIs would have completely vanished, and the treasury of minor races would be cleaned out by extortions. The free tech trading between the AIs without regard to the value of the techs involved only serves to exacerbate this problem. How would you like to receive my “Majesty” tech for your “Overlord Technology”? Riiiight...

* To further aggravate the diplomatic problems arising from loading, the game actually saves some of the AI decisions triggered by loading without your consent upon exiting the game. If game loading prompted the Drengins to extort you, you will be stuck with that extortion attempt no matter how many times you reload the game. While this may seem like a neat feature to prevent cheesy players from reloading the game to avoid unpleasant diplomatic encounters, it also has the effect of penalizing casual players without large chunks of play time because these compulsory saves seem to ignore good events and only recall the bad ones. Therefore the more often you load, the more often you experience bad events. If it is a design choice to save AI decisions upon exiting a game in order to reduce future calculation time, we must have some consistency so the AI will remember to do both good and bad towards or against the player.

To summarize this post, the bulk of my discontent with GalCiv stems from:

Bug: Research progress indicator
Bug: Sector influence reset upon game loading
Design Flaw: Long load times that may be a result of AI routines being processed upon game loading
Design Flaw: Free trading between AI to a degree that resembles cheating
Design Flaw: Diplomatic actions being triggered by loading games
Design Flaw: Inconsistency in what information the game is saving without player consent