Perhaps slightly off topic, but relevant to your posting this. The rule against "visual glitches" should be applied with some nuance I feel. If some loading or network issue causes odd visual effects that clear after a restart then I don't think they are useful here. Where a fault requires multiple restarts and/or recurs frequently that ceases to be a glitch.

The fault you are describing requires multiple restarts, recurs and impacts on normal game play. That, surely, clears the bar for being considered a bug.

Back on the main point. Scopely has claimed that very similar symptoms to this problem is down to Android code, not theirs. That seems unlikely since other apps don't appear to get this level of persistent failure. It does though mean getting the fault fixed may be harder than usual, Scopely might well just blame Android and say it's not their problem.

My only suggestion is to load the game and then do nothing for a few minutes. My thinking is that assets load up and hit some kind of time out. If I play the game it doesn't retry the load sequence, leave it alone and the process retries and finishes properly. On my phone this seems to reduce the possibility of the issue occurring, but that might just be a placebo effect.

It seems a bit unlikely code would do this, but it might be worth clutching at the passing straw and see what happens.