Oh yeah. For a saved game to work properly it needs to save the state of the game as it existed when the saved game was created.

Oh, as fas as I remember, it used to work, but with the latest release I am not sure anymore. (For the AI it does work, I believe). Will try!

What was happening was that I was loading an old save when I would make changes for debugging purposes.  However, the old save would load data incorrectly if something had changed, causing certain details to not be present, like unit lists on structures, language types for vocals, etc.; it worked perfectly once I started a new match or used the simulate feature in the map editor, which is what I've been doing now. Essentially, what I learned was, don't change details about a unit, or structure, and then load a previous save with that structure or unit from an older version of the mod.  it will not auto-update with the newest changes.

I was never able to capture a dock, though.