I'd have to go back through the auto-saves, but I know I've played some long games since. I encountered it under r884, and while I haven't encountered it since, that may equally be due to better random results and to my having changed the per-player planets to 5. Happened on the 2-player random map, and still happens routinely on anything made with the in-game map designer thing, but I don't know if you care about the map designer. How difficult is it to make additional player icons? I haven't worked with alpha channels before and don't know what's involved in them, but there are a host of potential images on the SW Wiki, many in svg format, which I could work on transferring if it's not too difficult.