Did I just delete my game?

My wife got a new phone. I had been playing an alt on her old phone, and she gave it to me when she got the new one. But she uses her apple ID on her new phone, and I needed to create a new apple ID on the old phone.

Apple has made the process of transferring phones cumbersome, to say the least. The game publishers and Apple want you to buy new apps for your new ID. Fine, if I was going to be buying apps, sure. But I want to move a game that I've spent money building up, and I don't want to lose it.

In the past, I've used a 3rd party freeware program on my laptop to backup and restore game states from my iphone. For UWE, I have never tried that. So I found myself unable to buy in-app purchases like FP or promotions unless I used the same apple ID that the app belonged to.

I googled the problem, and read that if you save your phone to the cloud, delete the app, and restore from the cloud, you can have your game state and your new ID. Kids, I'm going to stress this, don't do this unless you have a really good backup of your phone. Back up to your computer, to the cloud, whatever you can to be sure you aren't risking something that you don't want to lose.

I did just what they said. The backup to iCloud took an hour. The restore was daunting. You have to reset your phone. I mean, everything was erased. I did that, and then started the restore from iCloud. It took very little time to restore the settings. But I do suspect that the apps are not saved - only the purchase info - because it looked like the apps were downloading from the app store.

I was prompted for the password for my wife's apple ID. I put it in. The restore / download started, and ran quickly, just a few minutes. Then I got a message that Underworld Empire couldn't be restored.

My stomach turned over, did a flip or three, and started griping like the kids do when they are tired.


I went to the app store, searched for Underworld Empire, and downloaded it. It's free. Then I opened it, expecting to see myself at level 1 with a new player.

But lo! and behold! The game came up with my character, just like I hoped for. Now the game is associated with my apple ID, and I can upgrade or update it as I please.

I'm not really sure how this worked. I wouldn't recommend that anyone try this without doing more research than I did. But you CAN transfer your game state to a different ID if you have to. I hope that I never have to again.

I play on my ipad and iphone with one apple ID and different Game Center accounts. I've been advised by Apple to use a different ID for each device. Someday I may have to repeat the process. I'm not looking forward to it.