The Guild 3 News

Build number: 605338

Hello everyone!
Today is patch day. With this patch we are releasing new content (New map: Salzburg!), optimizations for multiplayer, new dialogue content, economy improvements and the first glimpse on the previewed AI improvements. Check-out the details below.

IMPORTANT: As previously announced we now fully switch to the new multiplayer backend with this patch. Before you host a game, make sure you have patch EA 0.9.10 (and higher) installed, to play on our new live server.

New features
- AI actions got an additional feasibility check in order to increase the success rate of using an action. Before this change, these checks were rather limited and as a result lots of actions were rarely used by AI family members successfully.
- AI Archetypes have been added, however, their full effect will only be felt in the game once we add new objectives, which will happen in the upcoming updates
- You are now able to “retire” your current leader in favor of your heir/heiress. All you need to do is to send your avatar to a monastery via the according action in the action bar. Your old leader will spend the rest of his/her days in the monastery and your heir/heiress will take matters into their own hands.
- NPCs will now select a more varied range of locations before offering a dialogue quest. This should reduce the frequency of characters standing in front of markets and other buildings when offering a quest. Reason for that change was that sometimes it was hard to trigger the quest dialogue in front of crowded areas.
- AI office holders will now also use political proposals (Proposal to change city laws, Influence public opinion, Prison sentence, Organise the city guards, Expropriate someone, Banish an individual). So you might consider applying for offices - if not to propose in your own interest then at least to prevent the positive outcome of proposals which could have a negative impact on your family!
- In order to have the dialogue bubbles fit better to the style of the game we did a visual overhaul of them. Hope you like it!

Content & Balancing
- With EA 0.9.10 we are releasing a new map: the romantic city of Salzburg.
- Vienna map has been updated to the new economy system.
- A filter was implemented which differentiates between children and adults so dialogue content is fitting the age of a character.
- We also created a bunch of new dialogues and added more variety for existing dialogues.
- Moreover, we made several significant changes to how needs and supply caravans work. First of all, multiple caravans can be spawned at the same time for a market. This can be required when many goods need restocking at the same time, otherwise the stock would dwindle. We made the caravans more intelligent with regards to which items they resupply, and how many. They will pack as many different goods as possible into their inventory, at most one stack per item. Additionally, they are now considering caravans that are already en route to the market, so that on maps with long resupply travel times they don't over/undersupply a market.
- Also, the way NPCs are purchasing goods has been updated. Social class is considered when inspecting shopping locations for eligibility, fixing issues where a poor character would walk into a high value shop trying to satisfy a need, but then being unable to buy any of the goods. Furthermore, the action no longer checks each frame if the shopping location still has goods. Instead, the character will more realistically walk to the shop and only then realize that they are sold out. Shoppers will attempt to shop for multiple needs if their inventory space allows it, and they will attempt to spread their shopping over multiple items if available, in order to not deplete a single item stock.

Optimizations
- We worked again on optimizing the multiplayer mode of the game. Our goal was mainly to reduce the package size sent every frame in order to reduce load for the host player. We are not yet finished with our optimizations but in our opinion, it’s a decent step in the right direction.

Bug fixes
- Fixed several crash bugs related to various reasons.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show vicinity circles of guards and lansquenets of died out dynasties.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show vicinity circles of guards and lansquenets after saving and loading a game although the characters were not there anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused the poison well action only to poison people entering the well building.
- Fixed a bug that caused speech bubbles to behave incorrectly when zooming in and out with the camera.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the dialogues about office changes on the Vienna and Presborok map in the respectively wrong city.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not use the correctly gendered dialogue lines when addressing political office holders.
- Fixed several bugs related to henchmen actions.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not calculate action weights correctly for lots of actions.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to use the wrong animation for characters using the walking stick item.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not correctly remove a political proposal if the proposing character died or is otherwise occupied (e.g. imprisoned, etc).
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to prevent purchasing a building from another player if the purchasing player is 1 below maximum number of businesses.
- Fixed several bugs related to host migration (multiplayer).
- Fixed a bug that allowed the leader to avoid fights with city guards by running away as soon as a city guard arrives.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to allow a character to cast a vote for a political proposal even if he or she is on a long distance trip.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the wrong number of players in a multiplayer lobby.
- Fixed a bug that caused to show “$gui.LOD.tutorialdifficulty” in the lobby when loading a multiplayer game.
- Fixed several text issues.

Known issues
- When placing a building over the debris of a destroyed one, the remains do not vanish.

Important information
The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “%userprofile%\Saved Games\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Saved Games\Guild3).
Multiplayer: If you have a restrictive firewall then you may have to manually open the following outgoing ports to be able to play in multiplayer: 61111 TCP & UDP, 36895 TCP & UDP, 36975 TCP & UDP. You can find this information as well in the FAQs Multiplayer on our webpage!
It is quite possible that some problems that you have in your game are caused by missing or corrupted files. In this case, the following might help: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your Steam library, then Properties - LOCAL FILES - VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES...
If you still have issues afterwards, then we recommend to uninstall the game and then manually delete the folder “%localappdata%\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3). Then re-install the game.
Crash dumps for bug reports can be found in “%localappdata%\Guild3\sentry\reports” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3\sentry\reports) per default.
Join our official Discord server (link) where you can meet us (that is, when we take a break from developing games) and other players to chat about the game.

What we are planning for the next patch
Our next patch will be all around the AI and the new production system.

A short outlook...
We are already working on the resource provider renting feature, on additional balancing changes and on new professions.

**********

We value your feedback!
If you have the time, we would appreciate it if you could fill out a short survey regarding the changes we made in patch EA 0.9.10: Google Form
Please note: we do not collect any personal information other than your feedback - you will remain completely anonymous. This survey will end the day we release the next patch.

Hello everybody!

With Developer Diary #11, we want to provide you with a small preview of the upcoming features and developments in The Guild 3, on which are working: new content and a revision of the balancing. First, it should be said that bug fixing, multiplayer and AI will continue to have the highest priority for us! Therefore, the work on new content was interrupted for a little more than three weeks so that we could work with full manpower on the completion of patch EA 0.9.9.

Now, let us talk about some of the changes to come.
In contrast to the predecessors, in The Guild 3 we have a clear separation between villages and cities, which in turn are divided into individual districts with their own markets. The basic idea is that you play in the village at the beginning of the game and have to earn the right to live and work in the city. We want to and will further deepen this separation, on the one hand by tightening the privileges for the residences and on the other hand by further emphasizing the differences between the individual types of residences.
The farmhouse, for example, can only be built in the village. The next higher residence, the house, can only be built in the city, but requires the title “Citizen”. The actions and / or items that are unlocked by your residence are also changed so that every higher residence gives you more options. And of course, there are new actions and new items for the residence.

Let's get to the business buildings. There are currently a number of businesses that can only be built in the village, like the crude craftsman hut, the windmill or the robber camp. The first building level of the other, higher-tier businesses like smithy or apothecary can be built in the village and in the city, but the building levels two and three can only be built in the city. We will change that: all three building levels of the higher-tier businesses, such as smithy or apothecary, can now be built exclusively on city grounds. The farm is of course the exception.
Now you will surely think that it will be boring and very monotonous in the villages, because at the start of the game you can only choose one of four professions. This would mean that the villages would be full of crude craftsman huts, farms, robber camps and herb huts.
But don’t worry, we have something up our sleeve for this too: we will introduce !!! 8 !!! new professions. This will not only give you a wider choice of starting professions, but will also allow you to build more different businesses in the village.

We revealed three of these 8 new professions in an interview with Gamestar magazine. First, some of the new professions produce goods, some of which will be new equipment, potions or artifacts. Other professions will have actions to make their money. At the same time, we move some raw materials or products to other businesses and also add a handful of new raw materials and some new products to existing professions. But now, let us talk about the three new professions for The Guild 3, which we want to share with you in today's developer diary:

- The tinker
The tinker belongs in the handicraft skill branch. Their products include cauldron and simple copper bracelets, but they also need wood for other products. You will be able to choose the profession of tinkerer at the start of the game.

- The barber
This new profession in the scholarly skill branch will be a service provider. Although it is well known that bathing makes you sick and miserable as the clever people of the Middle Ages already knew, this business has, for example, a large bathtub that you can get into for bathing. You can also choose the barber as a starting profession.

- The ...
The third profession is an old acquaintance in The Guild series that we will implement in The Guild 3 now. Many of you have asked us to do it. And we missed the profession as well :). We are talking about the gravedigger! You will find this ostracized profession in the rogue skill branch and you will also be able to choose it at the start of the game.

As we said, we are working on more innovations than we have mentioned in this developer diary. In the next DevDiary we will definitely tell you more. Promised!

Build number: 604079

Hi all!
Before we can jump into our patch notes, here’s an important information, particularly for players who are playing multiplayer:

IMPORTANT: With EA 0.9.9 we updated the backend for the multiplayer mode of the game. The change to the new system should provide more stability than the previous one we used. That said, it’s really important that you update the game to the latest version in order to see lobbies of players already playing with the EA 0.9.9 version. For now, we’ll also keep the old backend online but will soon turn it off.

Get your name in game - follow this link!

It has been a while since patch EA 0.9.8 but rest assured, we have been very very busy getting our latest patch to the level of today. Let’s talk about what’s actually inside. Well, as you may have already read in one of our development diaries, we have been working on a completely new feature for the game: Dialogues. With the new version, you will be able to play the first iteration of the feature and content. In parallel, we were also working on integrating a new multiplayer library for the backend and some other changes to markets and the economy. If you are interested in the details, please check out our patch notes below.

New features
- With the new version, citizens will engage in conversations with each other. They will chit chat with each other about all kinds of topics. Some of those conversations reveal how the citizens think of events happening in the game. In order to not cluster your screen, we introduced a level of detail for speech bubbles. If your camera is far away, you’ll only see a speech bubble icon. When you get closer, you will see the actual dialogue. As you may come “late” to an actual conversation, all the speech bubbles will be shown on the screen in chronological order. If a speech bubble gets too close to the border of your screen, it will get transparent.
- You will also be able to actively engage in conversations by using certain actions (eg. romancing). Some conversations require you to select a dialogue line. To do so, an icon is shown above your character. Click on the icon in order to open the dialogue line options. Each option can be linked with one of your character’s attributes. Choose wisely what you select as your selection may be disliked by your conversation partner and therefore end in a failure of the action itself. Depending on the result, you’ll receive either a reward or a penalty.
- You will also encounter NPCs on the map who would like to discuss a matter with your character. Those NPCs are showing an exclamation mark on top of them. To engage in a conversation with a NPC that wants to talk, select one of your characters and right click on the according NPC. If your character reaches the NPC in time, a conversation will be started.
- Whenever you have to select a dialogue line, you will also receive a notification just in case you are somewhere else with your game camera.
- We also added so-called “Point-of-interest-shout-outs”. NPCs will react to certain events like somebody is begging, fighting, boasting etc. What they are actually saying will depend on their social status, so expect some funny reactions.
- With the new market UI, we realized that we also need to do a pass on what item categories we are actually providing. To simplify the way of understanding which item fulfills which need, we updated the item categories and needs in a way that they both represent the different item categories and needs at the same time.
- In our last version we introduced the needs graphs to the market UI. With EA 0.9.9 we improved that UI. From now on the need graphs are shown per round and not per year.
- Another adaptation we made to the market UI is that you will now see all markets in the markets list on the right side of the UI. You can also select different markets from the top pull down menu or cycle through them using the arrow button.
- Since a while now, NPCs are buying from markets and front stores, but they were never really equipping an item they purchased. We implemented that now. So don’t be surprised if you see somebody passing by your character with a walking stick.
- With EA 0.9.9 the surnames of dynasty members and other important characters are shown in the 3d world and in other UI elements, like the office tree. So when you see a character with his or her full name displayed, you can be certain that he or she is important!

Content & Balancing
- All maps, except Vienna, have been updated to the new economy system, based on your feedback in the survey.
- We extended our logging system for the AI in order to have an easier time evaluating the AI’s behavior and how to improve it.
- The build times for resource provider items have been doubled in order to avoid overflowing markets.
- The fulfillment of needs now affects the growth or shrink of a city's population. The more needs are fulfilled the more the population of a certain social group will grow. If needs aren’t fulfilled the population of a group will shrink.

Art
- We further optimized and improved materials on characters and props (focus on metal).
- Mine, lumberyard and quarry now have a first version of work animations plus sounds.
- Magdeburg: due to the closing of the bridge north-east of the village of Olvenstedt, the brushwood was not accessible anymore. So we moved the brushwood to the other side of the river.
- We added more idle animations to workers who are idling in their production building.

Bug fixes
- Fixed several crash bugs related to various topics.
- Fixed crash that could occur if a character was to be thrown into jail but no valid path to the city was found.
- Fixed a bug that caused the spouse to not appear in church during the ceremony …
- Fixed a bug that caused automated employees to not resume their current task after being attacked.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the wrong reward information upon successfully breaking into a building.
- Fixed a bug (MP only) that caused a trade mission to be successful even if the character dies of old age during the journey.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to force the player to finish all trade missions in order to unlock any far-trade market.
- Several bugs related to storage rules and master AI have been fixed, especially for the warehouse, robber camp and some other businesses. Thanks to these fixes, the warehouses should work better now.
- Fixed a bug that caused warehouse transporters to buy items for the warehouse.
- Fixed a bug that caused warehouse transporters of rogue families to not get a route assigned upon being hired.
- Fixed a bug that caused resource provider buildings to have multiple stacks of the same item in their frontstore at the beginning of a game.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to deduct the influence costs twice when applying for an office position.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the gallows (execution) icon if the player opens 2 verdict windows after another and the first one has had the execution sentence as an option and the second did not.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to mess up the slot reservation system in production buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show workers working even after their shift has ended.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the family members on the wrong side during a dynastic trade.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show the dynasty flag on the butchery building.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show animated workers and market stand people in multiplayer games.
- Fixed several bugs in multiplayer games related to host migration.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to prevent a disconnected client from rejoining an active multiplayer game.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show the city guard circles on the client in multiplayer games.
- Fixed a bug that prevented players from buying items at far-trade markets in multiplayer.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to have problems starting up after a second monitor has been connected with the computer.

Known issues
- The likelihood of getting infected with diseases is currently very low. We'll balance that with the next patch.

Important information
The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “%userprofile%\Saved Games\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Saved Games\Guild3).
Multiplayer: If you have a restrictive firewall then you may have to manually open the following outgoing ports to be able to play in multiplayer: 61111 TCP & UDP, 36895 TCP & UDP, 36975 TCP & UDP. You can find this information as well in the FAQs Multiplayer on our webpage!
It is quite possible that some problems that you have in your game are caused by missing or corrupted files. In this case, the following might help: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your Steam library, then Properties - LOCAL FILES - VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES...
If you still have issues afterwards, then we recommend to uninstall the game and then manually delete the folder “%localappdata%\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3). Then re-install the game.
Crash dumps for bug reports can be found in “%localappdata%\Guild3\sentry\reports” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3\sentry\reports) per default.
Join our official Discord server (link) where you can meet us (that is, when we take a break from developing games) and other players to chat about the game.

What we are planning for the next patch
We are currently working on improving the AI and also on a pretty big overhaul of the production system and UI. This, plus multiplayer performance improvements can be expected to land with our next big patch.

A short outlook...
In the near future, we’ll start working on the renting of resource provider feature. Also, we’ll double down on the overall balancing of the game.

**********

We value your feedback!
If you have the time, we would appreciate it if you could fill out a short survey regarding the changes we made in patch EA 0.9.9: Google Form
Please note: we do not collect any personal information other than your feedback - you will remain completely anonymous. This survey will end the day we release the next patch.

Hi all!

It’s time for our next developer diary. Today we want to give you some more insight into one of the key systems in The Guild 3: The AI. Before we go into more detail on that topic, we want to say a few words on why AI is the topic of today’s dev diary. We received lots of feedback from you, both in the forums and also as comments in our surveys. The bottom line is that the AI dynasties are not as big of a challenge as they are supposed to be. What’s also mentioned often is that they act too arbitrarily. We absolutely see it the same way and that’s why we started to focus more on the behavior of the AI, both in aspects of functionality and balancing. Before we can go into more detail on how we want to improve the AI, we need to take a step back and give you more insight on how the AI is currently working.

Every action a family executes has an impact on their dynasty values like honest, cunning, generous, etc. You can find those values in the dynasty UI. Those values both represent how a dynasty is perceived and also how likely they act in certain situations. That’s an important point because those values have a big impact on how likely the AI is going to choose certain actions. Additionally, those values also have influence on the objective a family is trying to achieve. Before an AI family member decides which action to pick, the family gets an objective that they want to accomplish. This objective contains a pool of suitable actions.
For example “Grow family”. The objective of the family is to increase the amount of family members. As you know, there would be several ways of achieving this. They could adopt a child, have a baby or even try to marry somebody from another family. Based on the values of the dynasty and the objective they are following, an internal “weight” is calculated for all the suitable actions linked with that objective. Then the AI selects one of the actions and tries to execute it.
Usually, actions require a target. Let’s take the “Attack Someone” action as an example for now. So the AI is supposed to attack a character of a competing dynasty. How is that character chosen? Currently, and this is one of the problems we are facing, the selection algorithm is very simple. Right now, the target selected would be a dynasty that is one rank above the attacker’s dynasty. However, the attacker’s dynasty could actually have a good relationship with the dynasty of the higher rank, or the dynasty of the attacked could be so much stronger that it would be an obvious suicidal attempt to even try. Just with this small example you can see where the problems are. Additionally, the variety of objectives already supported by the game is not yet as big as we think it needs to be to create a good gaming experience.

As you can imagine, there are several different algorithms for different actions but with the examples above it’s clear why we want to make significant changes to improve that system.

So we’ll review all actions and objectives to fix and improve them. As mentioned above, the target selection process is also under review right now to improve and ensure that the targets are reliably found and make sense in the context of the respective family’s progression.

Another big topic we are working on is to create “personalities” for the families. Currently, they are just surviving, however, to make them into worthy opponents, that is not enough. We want the AI families to be able to thrive in their own way. Their personality will help to guide them throughout the game. In order to achieve that, they will be given a bigger pool of objectives. Some of them will be designed to compliment the personalities and are used only if they match the personality of the family. We want to expand the regular pool of objectives to include more game-relevant behaviors.

So, as you can see, there are several issues with the AI system that’s in place right now, but as you can imagine, we’ll not keep it at that at all. We started focusing on the AI and with our upcoming patches (after EA 0.9.9), you will be already able to experience these changes.
So what are we actually changing? First of all, we’ll add many more objectives in order to create more variety for the AI in the way of choosing an action and also to narrow down actions only to objectives where they actually really make sense. We’ll investigate every target selection algorithm and extend those in order to make the target selection more meaningful and logical. Please note, that of course there will always be an element of “randomness” or “irrationality” involved, so the AI doesn’t always appear to make the perfect decision and to avoid being too predictable for the player.

We’ll give you more detailed updates on the AI with every release where changes to the AI are made. We hope you will like the plan we are putting in place for the AI and are looking forward to your feedback.

Hey everyone!

First of all thanks for all the feedback so far on our patches EA 0.9.8 and EA 0.9.8.1! As you can imagine the change from 1 market and economy for the whole map to 1 economy per village and city district, including all the UI were big changes which we were eager to see how it works out in the wild. Back in March we released dev diary #7 with the focus on that change. Today we want to use this dev diary to foreshadow a - in our opinion - very interesting feature which will come live with patch EA 0.9.9. We will be talking about ...

... Dialogues

As many of you mentioned in comments and reviews The Guild 3 currently has a need to improve the feeling of immersion into the world. Everything you do in the game actually has an impact on the world itself but it’s not always reflected back to you, the player. You will remember that we talked about something similar already in the past when we completely overhauled the notification system. The purpose of this was to inform you in a more direct way what’s currently happening and where. This is obviously good for supporting gameplay and providing some overview while playing but it just didn’t provide the feeling of the world being alive. In our opinion the footprint you leave behind in your city needs to be reflected by the characters in the world. That’s why we are currently implementing an extended dialogue system to The Guild 3.

The purpose of this dev diary is to give you an overview of how dialogues should work in The Guild 3. First of all there will be 3 different types of dialogues:
- NPC conversations
- Action triggered conversations
- Quest conversations

NPC Conversations
The NPC conversations allow you to listen to people chats on the streets, and be more aware of what is happening in their life. While scrolling over the map you will find NPCs talking to each other. If you zoom in closer, you will be able to see what they are talking about. The range of topics NPCs will talk about is very wide. It could be personal things but also reactions to events that happened in the city (eg. law changes, votes, dynasties, etc.). We think NPCs conversations are a great way to let you know how people feel about what’s happening in their city and their lives.

Action triggered conversations
Action triggered conversations, as you can grasp from the name probably already, are actively triggered conversations by an action. Imagine that you want to compliment
someone, now you will have a chance to be engaged in a conversation and make your own decisions. If your avatar is in an active conversation you will be able to select what you want to say. Depending on your stats your selected option may be appreciated or disliked by your conversation partner. Moreover, it gives you the opportunity to roleplay your avatar in a way you imagine him or her to be. Are they smart? Are they charming? Are they direct? Choose your next words wisely!

Quest conversations
We also added the so-called quest conversations. You will encounter NPCs in the world with an exclamation mark in a speech bubble. Those characters can offer you some interesting talk on unique topics. You will need to take part in a discussion with the NPC and select one of the dialogue options. What you select will have an impact on gameplay. For instance you can use the conversation to talk badly about another dynasty, or promote yourself in a district.

As you can see we want to add quite a variety of dialogues to the game and we hope that you think, like we do, that it will make the world more alive. In EA 0.9.9 we will introduce the first iteration of dialogues but rest assured that we’ll add more dialogue content with every patch in the future.

We wish you all a nice weekend and are looking forward to the release of EA 0.9.9 somewhen mid to end of June. We hope you do too!