A save game from quite a while ago? Sometimes the updates might break saves depending on what's in the update.

You know I'm not one to complain about stuff like this, but where is the support here?  Is there someone employed at Stardock that actually helps with issues like this?  I mean I paid a hefty sum of money to be a Founding member of this game and I can't even play it because it's riddled with bugs.  Is there a link to get a refund?

I did a full re-install and NOTHING.  I'll be updating my review on Steam to reflect my very poor experience with something so simple as to load a game from less than 24 hours ago.  

It depends on what version of the game you started the new game with.  If the 'long break' had you on a very old version of the game (Steam not set to auto-update), there may not be much we could do.

What I do want to know, however, is if you start a new game with 1.8, save, reload, that it works as expected.

As I stated in my first post; I started a NEW game after updating to the NEW version 1.8.  

I played for about 5 hours, saved my game multiple time with the autosave, previous autosave, and a clean fresh new save.  The next day I logged on and the game told me that my brand new saves with the brand new updates were incompatible.

The key words here are "new" and "updated".

Please submit a ticket with the link Island Dog provided above. You can post the ticket ID here once you submit it.