Shame... also I have heard of replays that go funky in late-game and do not represent what actually happened. Can anyone confirm?
Bug confirmed; that has happened to me too fairly recently. There seem to be some heisenbugs in the replay watch feature, i.e. it may so happen that if you play the recorded file again it might work properly, but there are also cases where the recording is definitely borked beyond recovery. I've confirmed the latter kind of bugs by passing recordreb files to someone else, but I also experience the former myself.
On the topic of this thread: the recordreb are basically save games followed by unidirectional simulation steps (ticks) with no subsequent checkpoints (like key frames in a movie/animation) whatsoever. Given this design choice, it would be very difficult to have any sort of fine-grained time reversal. Better designs exist, but Sins developers opted for this simple but rather unreliable design. A single error/desync in the recording or its playback cascades and amplifies itself making the replay sometime nothing like what you saw in actual/initial play. Most easily tested with the dev exe, because most galaxy-chaning dev commands desync. For example spawn some ships; fight them, then record. Or kill some ships with the dev commands. If you record something like that, the recording is nothing like what you saw in actual play.
And more generally, Sins save games are buggy too, even without the complication of subsequent simulation steps found in recordreb files) See Advent corvettes guns bug for instance, where a save-load sequence makes the side & rear guns of the Advent corvettes stop working...
