On Saturday we played a 5-6 hour long game.  Somewhere in the middle of the game we ended up with a situation in which two of us lost sync with our third player - without crash - so badly that when we looked at the starmap on his machine he occupied 1/4 of the map and on both of ours he was wiped out and ceased to exist.  Literally we went into star systems that he owned - and he could see our fleets moving in - and when we got there we saw that star system occupied by the AI rather than him while on his map we were parked in his system.  Exiting, rebooting, and reloading the save did not resolve the issue.  Turns out we had been playing 'out of sync' in this manner for hours.  I'm guessing that the 'sync fix' in the past made it so that the game doesn't crash any longer when you are out of sync thus it tolerates the problem and things get out of hand so long that basically people are playing 'in their own paralle universes' so to speak.  In any case, just thought I'd bring it up.  We have played 3 or 4 multiplayer games using the beta and this is the only time that such a thing has occurred.