I really like the idea for the food. Sometimes you don't want to do anything and still you use up all of your food. You could keep it then for rounds to come where there's more to do.

When I turn the sound off from the beginning the slowdown doesn't occur. It definitely goes straight back to normal when I switch the sound, I have yet to try it with only human players, but in the last version it was the same there.

I still get the slowdown at the start of each round just before the landgrab in version 1.2.4.
I can stop it by switching the sound off and on again, but next round the same thing happens. The game doesn't try to catch up like it did in the last version, so it is going steadily once I turned the sound on again. I'm on xp and only tried it locallly with 3 AIs.
Thanks for the improvement in the new version, hope it will work completely for me someday.

The slowdown occurs at the beginning of each turn, whether there is a land grant or not (if the plots are all taken). In the beginning it slows down when the ship is taking off and the sound distorts a little. Hope that helps.

I have a soundcard on my pc, i will check the log files if it is the same. For me it wouldn't work even after I turned sound off. We'll see.

That's interesting that it works well without sound at your pc as well. Anybody any idea what we can try to solve the problem? Would be nice to have sound...

I have the same symptons on xp, but it doesn't slow down if I turn the sound off, so it felt like it was a java/sound issue.