The insta-building bug is alive and well in 1.02. In fact you can watch it happen right before your own eyes.
Although claimed to be fixed with 1.01 - "Fixed bug where sometimes the AI would force complete all of its construciton projects on the first turn after loading a game because it was using stale city defender power ratings (these are now recalced and cached while the game is loading)" the behaviour is still present.
Come on guys, fix it - the whole saga is doing your credibility the world of harm.
Also by looking at the research on the Foreign Relations screen Markinn manages to do 4 research (from 203 to 207) even though his only city produces a mere 0.7 research points. He has nothing to offer in trades, I know because I set up treaties this turn and he went from -250 odd gildar up to about -190 curtesy of my treaty making and he had no resources or tech points to offer.
If you look at the save or the screenshots you will see that on turn 70/71 the AI gets 110 turns of construction for free. It is a novice difficulty game. So that means instead of doing 50% production it jumps to 125% = greater production than challenging level, approaching hard. The research speed is about 5 times what it should be so instead of going at 50% of the player the AI is proceeding at 250%, all with a single city. This is not non-cheating AI and you are selling the player up the river by telling them that they receive bonuses to research and production compared to the AI on this the easiest level. God knows what happens on the higher levels of difficulty, at least this and maybe far worse.
If you load the save you can see it happen for yourself before your own eyes. (The game uses parrottmath's snaking and bridge mod's but they are not involved in this.)
End of season 70
Beginning of season 71
And the save game.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14105530/c70b.zip
My sovereign is right beside the city when this happens...
