Stuck in Galactic War: water planet has zero landing site, cannot pick another system (regular PA)

Game just killed a 15 hour playthrough by loading up a water planet w/ barely 2 small islands and giving my air army zero landing zones. Worse, the game doesn't allow me to pick another system once I arrive at an unbeaten system. Worse 2: there's only one save file, so I can't go back to pick another system to work around it. AFAICT, the playthrough that I put a few hours into is now dead.

Regular PA, not Titan, no mods, files verified in Steam.

Sometimes the landing zones seem to be under water and quite invisible. What you can still try though is to just wait until you auto-spawn. The server will just pick a landing zone for you then. It will take a minute or two.

Didn't work, I idled for 5 game minutes. I even clicked all over the planet, no landing site.

Same happened to me, but with some weirdness:
I just started the game and got a subcommander from the first planet. Next two had enemies but I beat them easily, then I selected a system with only one planet and there is only one tiny island, like you could barely fit two factories there. Still had like six metal spots though.

There was a tiny circle underwater that might have been the spawn area, but I still couldn't select it at all, so I quit and reloaded-surprise! No option to leave or load an earlier save.
(Hint: This is what is known as a bug, not a feature.)

After few tries of everything else, I picked Surrender option and the game finally started. My subcommander spawned, apparently right at that tiny circle so that might explain why there was no room for my commander. It built couple of sea and air factories(on the water) and started fabbing energy generators, metal extractors and units.

After a while the subcommander had scouted around the planet and turns out the enemy commander is nowhere to be seen.

After ten minutes of watching that I started another GW campaign, is there a way to backup my save so if that happens again I can go around the system?

All of the PA data is stored here:
Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\
OSX: ~/Library/Application Support/Uber Entertainment/Planetary Annihilation/
Linux: ~/.local/Uber Entertainment/Planetary Annihilation/

If you back up that directory, you can always go back.

Thanks.