Actually, this is one of the changes I like about Civ3. It appears that it determines the contents of goody huts when they appear on the screen, so you can't just run up to them, save, and re-load until you get something you want. Unless you go back to before it was visible, or at least a couple of turns, you always get the same thing.
The battles appear to work similarly. If you save, attack, reload, and attack with the same unit (even if you do different stuff in between), the result will be the same, even the sequence of damage taken by each unit.
This certainly takes away the temptation to save/re-load whenever something doesn't go your way. At the very least, you now have to go back a full turn or possibly several turns, which forces people to accept bad results and use more strategy rather than "fixing the dice" whenever it suits their purposes.
You've probably noticed by now that I have fallen victim to this temptation in the past, and it's more of a challenge and much more fun NOT to struggle against giving in to that temptation any more.
