It's not an MMO so persistance is really no consideration at all.

Come to think of it, I haven't actually finished a game, yet. I was in a winning position several times already but I knew I had won.
Why bother going through the moves and roll over the helpless AI?

Yes, it would be mostly OK with me. But Impulse should have a "Warning Pop-Up" before downloading and installing the update. Like "Previous savegames will be incompatible with this version of Elemental. Do you want to continue?".

The ... I think it was 1.06 (or was it 1.05) update felt a bit like a sneak attack if you hadn't been up to date reading the forums. ("Hey, why aren't my savegames working anymore?") You had to read the patch-notes on your own before (!) clicking on "update" to know what would happen.

So yes, it's basically OK, but there should be a clearly visible warning pop-up.

Rabenhoff

I dunnow about that though... I mostly play rpg's, and it would be pretty damn annoying if you had to start over after 30 hours ingame because of a patch But in this game, the fun is starting a kingdom and exloring/expanding so it's quite different.

Stardock is such nice a company (no kidding here) that they might try to preserve compatibility.

Players do feel it and feel obliged to say "It's OK, Stardock, don't mind this detail, focus on the gameplay"

I believe it is Stardock's goal to maintain compatibility across versions.  The only reason 1.06 "broke" previous saves is because Stardock was getting support tickets with save files from the beta, so in order to create a clean slate, they simply hard coded it so that previous saves wouldn't work in order to force everybody to start a new game.

In my more recent experiences with updates it is exactly the other way around. Mostly the developers of a game try nearly everything so that savegames do not become invalid ... or that in general past time spend with the game does not become dead weight.

So the industry standard seems to have switched pretty much to "savegame compatibility" over the last years ... and rightly so in cases of games where you spend several hours / days / weeks on one particular game. But I can agree that it has still been different a few years ago.

The shifted standard would also then explain, why every time compatibility cannot be guaranteed, you see (more or less) lengthy apologies by the companies ... or at least by those that care about their customers.

Rabenhoff

PS And as to the manual ... what manual? I would not call the pdf file that came with Elemental a manual, as it explains nearly nothing. More a booklet. A manual is something different. However, I then would also expect updates to a manual for any software that's mostly distributed online ... but so much for being realistic.

I disagree with this as a matter of principle, this game is time consuming and not at all 'casual', I want to invest my time on something that won't be garbage in the next patch or two. I think it's very important the save files are retained throughout patching if at all possible. At the very least if it must be done, please warn us so we can finish our current games.

Why don't you just stop investing time for a month or so?