I finally got my wife to try this game out! She's not a strategy gamer, but she loves 'personalizing' within the games she plays if she can. (Never seen anyone spend so much time in Spore's creature creator, lol). So, naturally, the first thing she wanted to do after the tutorial, before reading any of the bios, was create her own Sovereign.
She went though, probably spent a good half hour carefully going through, reading, and selecting all the traits and such that she wanted, and then noticed something that would turn out to be diabolical in consequence.
She decided to go through and decide on a new race/faction. She browsed through them, randomly selecting one after another.... *poof!* *Bang!* *pow!*
With each click, she unwittingly was overriding all the custom data she'd entered!! -- she was, needless to say, pretty pissed upon this discovery. I was too, honestly.
That this is even a possibility seems to be a terrible oversight! I understand that so much (and soon, much more!) will be determined by your base faction, so much in fact, that by switching factions it makes sense that you'd have to start over.
But there's nothing to prevent, or even warn the user that their time will have been lost if they change this one (and to a noob: seemingly trivial) characteristic.
Suggestion:
-- When creating a new sov, perhaps have the user create the sov in steps? Or at least a first window where you choose race/faction? It could display useful information like faction-specific units/traits/abilities/buildings as you click or highlight a picture representative of each race/faction. And then after this step, then the user can be free to go willy-nilly!
In other words, restrict actions into a linear path that affords a user only actions / consequences that are desirable. Data-wipeage not being desirable (unless of course, this was indicated as being desired by a user by, for instance, clicking a "start-over" button)
(This, of course, this setback has not prevented her from succumbing to my plan to get her hooked to FE! 
)
