Loss of data when switching between single and multiplayer

[eode]

First of all, I'd like to say that this is a really great game. After a lot of hunting around, this is what we landed on and stuck with, and it's really the only game in the genre that had everything we wanted (and more). ..so, thank you for that. :-)

I know that this has already been brought up, but when switching between multiplayer and singleplayer, all of the fog-of-war data (and quite a bit of other data, including the location of star lanes) is lost.

I know this is by design, and it's been stated prior that this is somewhat difficult to solve -- but I think it's something that needs *some* kind of attention. This is a great game with few real problems, and I think this is one (really, the only one that I've found) that significantly interferes with gameplay.

Here are a couple of thoughts on this that might be easy to implement:

This first method is somewhat hackish, but might work fine:
Instead of a 'User' dir, there's a 'User', 'Singleplayer', and 'Multiplayer' folders. The 'User' folder is either a link to or copy of the 'Singleplayer' or the 'Multiplayer' folder.

• When a single-player game is chosen, data from the 'Singleplayer' folder is copied/linked to "User"
• When a multi-player game is chosen, data from the "Multiplayer" folder is copied/linked to "User"
• When "Save and quit" is selected, data is copied from "User" to "Multiplayer" or "Singleplayer", depending on the game type.

The above, again, is kindof hackish, but it would probably work, assuming you also handled the kind of scenario you run into when the game is killed/crashes during gameplay.

Another idea is to simply warn the user when they are about to invalidate prior data. So, if my girlfriend the explorer (for example) were to choose a single-player game accidentally instead of a multiplayer game, she wouldn't lose all of her exploration work on our collective game, and would cease to be filled with sadness due to lost gameplay time.

Any possible fix / warning / workaround to help avoid data loss from human error in the works?