It's a bad design decision and yes, there should have at least been some forewarning of this... heck something like when you speak to the orc woman she teleports you to the new stuff right away... or hell at least let you start off with the correct island uncovered to allow you to proceed.....

way way annoying and the Devs love them as I might for creating such a wonderful game, need to know they dropped the ball on this one.

I saw this coming, in fact everyone should have seen it coming... After the Gift Pack Mod, that was essentially just adding new items to the game, required the same. I guess the way KB is set up, the only possibility of amending the existing game is by mods, and those cannot be played together.

My question would be, however - we know the new Orc units are in the Orcs on the March mod, however, I heard a lot of other units get modifications, and new units are added as well. Are those also ONLY in this campaign?

I should have seen this coming because of the giftpack mod? what gift pack mod?

Well, BB ... I've only played KB:TL vanilla and did so like a year ago, never got AP until I heard about CW on steam, got the pre-order with all three, and started AP.

I can see how people that are into the 'scene' of the game might or should have supposed this would happen, but to the average consumer like me ... it was very frustrating the way it went down. A simple note somewhere that had said that AP saves would be incompatible with OotM would sure have been nice. As I said above, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that an add-on expansion that appears to mostly adds quests, skills, and new units to buy would work w/old saves.

I broke down and started over since I didn't want my money to be wasted. There certainly are a whole lot more orcs around to be bought right from the beginning, along with what look to me to be new units like 'witch hunter' (although maybe I just never found one of those before in AP).

I've yet to really see anything that's made me go 'oh NOW I get why they HAD to break saves'. I suppose some of the stuff that they've added to the beginning would sorta be 'wasted' if you were starting on a way higher level/on a distant island, but ... that's about it. And there's some minor changes on the skill trees, which I guess technically 'complicates' things with old saves.

Even the old SSI games of the 90's and old Sierra's Games (Hero's Quest anyone), allowed you to transfer characters from one game to another...
Very disappointing... wish I'd known that before purchasing also.

Why don't you finish AP and then play Orcs on The March? AP still makes sense and so does OOTM. I finished AP 10 times already and I think I'll finish Crossworld more times. Maybe you don't like the changes in OOTM and still want to play AP.

You listed a bunch of action/adventure games (AKA, diablo clones), which simply operate under totally different types of rules than a game like this. Yeah, it'd be cool if you could get your save games updated, but that would require some pretty weird programming to extend off what they currently have.

When you create a new game, ALL of the content of the game is generated at once, including which random armies exist, what lewt in what location, how much in the little piles of gold, and which leadership flags there are. All of it.

I can completely understand that with that as a basis, it'd be pretty darn hard to just smush more stuff in there.

Is there going to be other "add on's" after Crossworlds....??? Am I going to have to restart AGAIN if there's is?

Let's see... there are new skills that you can learn for every class. The maps have changed, there are new buildings such as the Academy (where you can upgrade units) and new quests, there is even a new boss in the game. Then, as you said, there are lots of new units - if you have used your old save you'd have never found them. Also, ALL the Rage Spirit skills are now available as spells to be learned.

I think the main problem would have been altering the map - you most likely already cleaned up Debir, well now there'd be some new quests and buildings there that you most likely would have missed as you wouldn't have gone back to check.

Crossworlds came out about a year after Armored Princess. Do you really think you'll be playing the same game a year from now?