Losing several hours worth of gameplay for some random reason like a blackout or a game/windows freeze/crash/etc is painful, especially in Aurora, so it seems to be a good idea to me to have some sort of auto-save. I hear from more experienced players that in some previous versions Aurora saved every action to DB, which slowed the game down quite considerably, so instead I propose periodical saves like this:
- on loading the game, initialize last save time with current time
- after processing one turn, check how much real time has passed since last save
- if this time is larger than X seconds/minutes/whatever (possibly a setting?), save the game and reset last save time to the current time
This won't be exactly "each X minutes/whatever", but it's close enough, and more importantly doing it like this won't introduce sluggishness (due to saving) at random points of time, which can be annoying if the player tries to do something useful.
