I am still really new and playing through my second game. I saved after several hours a few days ago and resumed my game where I had just finally broken free of pirates that had me (and everyone else) cornered. I then put my superior weapons to use and conqured a few planets then saved.

So upon restarting I go a few turns and some cutscene for a plague shows up. The movie seems odd as it shows a ship flying over water rather than anything disease related.

Shortly after I notice my research is HORRID. I tried cranking the bar in the econ screen, but its just so slow. Strangely I seem to have to work hard to lose money though. And, my 2 upgraded Paladins are gone- well I can't see them but the ship finder shows them a bit south of a planet (they seem to be invisible). I tried to increase research by buying more buildings... but no research buildings are in my build menu anymore (I can see the old ones in the "old menu" though). And my ships... I don't have any templates to build any of my researched ships anymore (transport, corvette, paladin, etc) as I only have the originals and the upgraded versions of the originals (scout, colonizer, freighter). Oh and a 800 attack Dreadlord is blowing everything (that is not invible) to pieces.

I forwarded about 60 turns to get the cure just to see what would change and my shipyard goes back to normal but everything else is borked.

I tried loading some save games, in one of them the invisible Paladins had a blue square where they should be.

The only other thing I can guess might effect it was when I installed the gold edition I then uninstalled the demo, but the game seemed to think IT had been uninstalled (when the demo was). I did a "repair" in add/remove programs and it came back so I figured all was good. It was at that point I played the first half of the pirate game and all seemed fine until I tried to play it again today a few days later.

Any ideas what the heck is going on?