Would you plaese STOP resetting game settings every time you patch?  I could see it if anything about the settings were changing but they are not.

This is aggrevated by the fact that the game crashes or locks up with alarming frequency, and if my autosave every turn gets reverted to a large number, I lose a lot of progress, I shut down the game, and I come here and complain.

Or here's a novel concept...write code that doesn't crash or lock up so much.  No other games I play crash or lock up as much as Elemental and GalCiv2 with Elemental crashing considerably more.  I even have some games that *gasp* never crash or lock up at all.  Imagine that!

I have a clean and beefy PC.  Win7-64, Quad core, 6G RAM, ATI 5770, latest drivers, running almost nothing in the background (I always strip the windows crap to a bare minimum for gaming rigs) and nothing else running.  No new game should crash this much on hardware like this - and none do except Elemental (And GC2:DA).