I had and continue to have the same problem. Past a certain number of turns or too large an empire, and any reload of a save crashes the game client.
This is a doubly serious problem because I still get the occasional crash during/after combat or the game occasionally gets stuck in a loop sometimes or otherwise does not respond. If the autosave is not working after this, the game is essentially over.
I am running a dual core desktop system, with win7-64 if that helps.
