[jscott]

I'm going to leave this discussion at this point alone. There's just no point in arguing that ingame saves are needed, when most of the people playing are willing to come online, concede there are bugs that can severely impact play, but then turn around and argue that ingame saves aren't necessary.

Nearly every game that comes out, in any genre, has an ingame saving feature. It certainly is in every strategy game (turn based or RTS, from Civilizations to Gal Civ to Europa Universalis to Starcraft to whatever you want to name).

It is not a crutch that allows people to play poorly.

It is not a cheat that allows human players to outwit the AI (frankly if you need a cheat to beat the AI in Dom 3, strategy games might not be your gaming genre).

It is a convenience that keeps a person from abandoning a very long game in progress (and Dominions is a very long, deep game) and having to restart because of a bug, a flukish event, or just because something happens you didn't want to happen (like forgetting to produce or a move a unit). This is single player, against the AI, and this condescending attitude that people here have for a feature that is incredibly basic in any PC (or even console game at this point) is unfathomable.

As for it being hard to implement, if it just takes me 1 second to do it on my own, then it can't possibly be very difficult to implement.