The Guild 3 News

Build number: 602143

Hi all!

With this small but very important update in between the patches EA 0.9.8 and EA 0.9.9 we are switching the error tracking system from Backtrace to Sentry plus we are fixing some annoying bugs in multiplayer as well as with the far trading system. Also, we would like to know which version of the new economy system introduced with EA 0.9.8 is your preferred one - so we want to kindly ask to compare a test version of the London map with the normal version and to give us your opinion afterwards.

Thank you in advance!

Bug fixes
- Some crashes and some smaller general bugfixes for Multiplayer
- Characters did not show up in the user interface of the port building
- Fixed a bug where far trade markets via the port building were unlocked from the very beginning (before it is unlocked by having the Free Citizenship)

Economies
We hope to get your help for a test regarding the new economy system: you will find a second version of the London map in the map selection menu, where every district/village has its own economy. We would be grateful if you could compare both maps and fill out a short survey regarding the changes we made in patch to London: Google Form

Maintenance
- The error tracking for the game was switched from Backtrace to Sentry
Important: Crash dumps for bug reports can now be found in ‘C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Guild3\sentry\reports’ per default (for easy access open Windows Explorer and type the following in the address field: ‘shell:Local Appdata\Guild3\sentry\reports’)

All the best and have fun playing!

Build number: 601665

Hi all!
We are very very excited to release patch EA 0.9.8 to you all today. This update contains a major and significant change on the overall economy gameplay experience. As already announced in one of our dev diaries, the whole situation of just having one market / one economy representing all the different villages, city districts etc. was always a thorn in our eyes. That’s changed now. From now on, a market can represent a group of neighborhoods, their needs and of course also the amount of stored goods and their prices. This adds a new layer of gameplay as it is now way more relevant where you buy and sell your goods or where to erect your production buildings. It also allows you to make money from selling from one market to another. Additionally, we added something very very interesting for all you unlawful businessmen out there. See below! So excited!

IMPORTANT: The new economy system has not been applied to all maps yet. Please test the new system in: Wenighusen, Heligoland, London, Warsaw, Augsburg and Magdeburg. The scenario maps of Paris, Vienna & Presporok and Visby have not received an overhaul of the economy system yet and so their marketplaces are all in the same market economy as they were before this update. We will have them adjusted in the next update.

New features
- From now on, a market can represent a set of villages and/or city districts. Needs and prices are fully influenced by supply and demand of the according market and the associated neighbourhoods. So selling daggers in a village won’t affect the prices anymore in a market within the city...
- To support this massive change we completely reworked the market UI! You are now able to switch between markets. You can see which neighborhoods are associated with that market. You can now clearly see who else is currently visiting the market and we also added 2 major UIs to support your decision making on what products you should provide.
- First of all, we added price statistics to the game. This new tab in the market UI gives you an overview of the price development PER market or group of markets. This way you can monitor price trends and adapt your overall strategy. For instance it could make sense to just hold back on some of your products. Store them in your warehouse until prices go up again.
- The second tab we added to the market UI is the need overview. Before our update this was a hidden system in the background influencing demand. We wanted to change that and clearly show you how the needs of an economy (market) are changing. Please note that we are not fully happy yet with the different need categories so we’ll most likely change them in the future.
- As there are now different prices between different markets for the same goods, it’s crucial that you can quickly see where the biggest benefits can be made. Of course, we don’t want you to always have to open the market UI to do so. That’s why we updated the item tooltip. It will now show you the market with the highest buying price and the market with the lowest selling price (buying price is the price the marketplace pays you as the seller, selling price is the price you pay when purchasing at a marketplace).
- As you know, there is also a system in the background to sustain markets if some crucial items for getting the economy are not in stock. We had to add that in the past quickly to avoid several deadlocks prone to the old system. That said we were never fully happy with that solution as there was no way of keeping goods from getting to the market. With EA 0.9.8, goods needed for the market will be delivered by foreign traders. They of course can be ambushed and robbed but beware, they are heavily guarded! Catch them before they reach their destination.

Content & Balancing
- AI behavior has been tweaked a bit, they should now focus a bit more on having enough children and businesses before branching out to more complex activities.
- AI Start skill picking was improved, the professions should now be more evenly distributed over all AI families.
- AI now has a threshold for declaring feuds, if the other dynasty is friendly enough the AI will first reduce that reputation before declaring a feud.

Art
- Besides the rework for the separated markets, our designers invested additional time especially into the scenario maps Magdeburg, Augsburg, London and Warsaw. You will find some surprises in all maps :-)
- We added new walls for villages. You can see an example of that already in Magdeburg.
- Some new work animations have been added to the starting businesses. It is just an early iteration and we will continue working on that.
- General texture improvements.

Bug fixes
- Fixed several crash bugs in singleplayer and multiplayer.
- Fixed a bug that caused the spouse to not stay in the church after the wedding and execute their previous task.
- Fixed a bug that caused workers to not continue their work after they fled with a full inventory.
- Fixed a bug that caused kidnapped characters to not get freed after the building they were chained in is conquered by their family.
- Fixed a bug that caused kidnapped characters to remain chained up if the building they are held captive in is bought by their own family.
- Fixed a bug that caused a character to get kidnapped despite the fact that the kidnapper’s inventory was full.
- Fixed a bug that caused a kidnapped character to be prisoner in multiple locations at the same time.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to allow kidnapped characters to be married via a dynasty trade.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to idle if they use the attack someone action twice on the same target.
- Fixed a bug that caused kidnapped characters to go to prison with their kidnapper.
- Fixed a bug that caused children born in captivity don’t get the kidnapped status effect.
- Fixed a bug that caused the verdict of a kidnapped judge to still be counted as valid.
- Fixed a bug that caused kidnapped characters to still be shown in certain scenes (eg. office voting).
- Fixed lots of edge cases for kidnapping characters.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to get stuck in resource gathering buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused unconscious characters to randomly stand-up again.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to endlessly postpone the execution of henchmen.
- Fixed a bug that caused transporters to never procure more than a stack of 60 items.
- Fixed a bug that caused executions not being … executed … correctly and thus leading to a traffic jam of to-be-executed poor souls.
- Fixed a bug that caused the tutorial to get into a deadlock if a certain step is done before the quest has been received.
- Fixed a bug that allowed the avatar to leave the execution by using the send home button.
- Fixed a bug that caused rogue actions to be stopped if certain scenes are started.
- Several text bugs have been fixed.

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 “c:\Users\[USERNAME]\Saved Games\Guild3\” (standard under Windows).
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 can 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 "C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3\" (or "C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Documents\Guild3\"). Then re-install the game.
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
For our next patch we are planning to refine the balancing for the new separated market system, adapt all the scenario maps and potentially already deliver the first iteration for the renting of mine, quarry and lumberyard.

A short outlook...
We are currently already working on a dialogue system that will increase immersion and also making some choices more impactful. This is going to be a big feature but we are progressing well - more on that in the coming developer diary :)

**********

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 0.9.8: 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 everyone,

Please note: Patch EA 0.9.8 will be released end of April / start of May, if the tests with the new seperated markets system continue to be promising as they are. However, this developer diary focus on a feature of a later update.

In this Developer's Diary I want to talk a bit about the raw material producers in the surrounding regions of the scenario maps: the mine, the quarry, and the lumberyard.

These three businesses are different compared to other businesses in several ways. First, they produce raw materials only. Then they are located outside of any settlement, with few exceptions. All of them start with transporters already equipped with horse carts so that they can deliver their raw materials to the marketplaces fast from beginning on. And all three are controlled by a master AI. That reminds me of one of the design meetings regarding the new markets system for patch EA 0.9.8 , where we discussed how the AI should try to make money and vanhuiza said: "It's not like money is growing on trees", and Tyleet interjected: "Except for the lumberyards...". But I am getting ahead of myself, sorry… let me roll back my thoughts...

Back in the days of "Europa 1400 - The Guild" (trivia knowledge: the translation of the German title is "The Guild - Trade, Greed & Intrigues"), where I was part of the developer team, it was possible to rent these resource producers. Every once in a while the Lease Master called the important dynasties of the city for a lease auction, where every participant was able to make their bidding. Naturally, the highest bid got the tender. And also naturally there was a lot of bribing, threatening and so on in the run-up and some plans for revenge afterwards.

As we developed "The Guild 2" we responded to the wishes of many fans of the series and we allowed players to own and/or build the raw material producers themselves. In addition, we had to implement watchtowers so that the owner of the mine could defend themselves better against gangs of robbers and marauding henchmen of their opponents, because no city guards were patrolling where those businesses were located. This is why there were a lot of armed conflicts around the resource providers, from which the dynasty with most and best "troops" often emerged as the winner and therewith as the new owner.

After this short history lesson let's get back to the present... where was I? Ah, yes… The Guild 3 has resource producers like in TG1 and TG2, but you cannot own and/or build them yourself, nor can you rent them to run them for a certain time. The only way you can interact with resource producers right now is by either shopping in their front store or ambushing their carts with your robbers. We want to change that!

We are currently preparing the design and planning for bringing back the renting of resource producers to the game. Core will be that the most important dynasties will be invited again for lease auctions for the city's mines, quarries, and lumberyards. The leader of the dynasty who wins the auction becomes the renter and thus the manager of the business. The renter can for example affect the prices of iron by flooding the marketplaces with iron or holding back their iron and thus put the competing blacksmiths in dire straits. Or they can store all raw materials produced by that business in their own businesses or warehouses instead of selling them at the marketplace. The rent agreement is signed for a specific time period. When this period is over, the dynasty automatically loses control of a resource producer and at the next opportunity there will be a new lease auction.

We hope that you will like this feature and that it will add a new interesting layer of influencing and controlling the economy. Additionally we are really looking forward to see how the gameplay around it will turn out.

Heinrich Meyer (Producer) & Purple Lamp Studios

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since our last dev diary and we want to get back to a more regular pace with those. With our upcoming dev diaries, we want to shine a light on features that we are currently working on and that will be launched in the foreseeable future.

Before we lift the curtain a bit on how The Guild 3 will evolve, we want to assure you that the team is working on a lot of bug fixes and other features for patches to come, on some of them even since December. As announced last year, you can expect a larger patch every 6 to 8 weeks, if nothing severe happens that prevents that. In between, there can always be smaller hotfix patches, like the last two patches were.

But now, without further ado, the first thing we want to talk about is the separation of markets on the map. We have gotten a lot of feedback that many of you would like to see markets with independent stocks for each Village/City. Since we agree that this feature is an important part for an economy simulation, we started to think about the necessary steps to make this possible and the implications of this step. So far, we had one map that had two independent markets: “Vienna and Presporok”. The system that was in place only allowed one market per city, so to have independent markets you would need a complete separate city with a legal system, political offices, guard, etc. This made it impossible for villages which were part of the government of a city, like for example Magdeburg, to have an independent market.

That’s why we decided to rework the system and disconnect an economy from the city government. From now on, our designers are able to define multiple economies (meaning independent markets) per map and assign villages and city districts individually to an economy. All marketplaces that share the same economy will share the same inventory. This gives us the flexibility for example to separate the markets for every district of a city from each other. Or we can combine the markets of two districts and separate all others.

Our plan is to give our existing maps a small rework where we will separate the markets, so that depending on the map size there will be two to five independent markets per map. We also plan on increasing the distances between marketplaces so that you will have to make a more conscious decision on where best to place your businesses. So some villages will be better for woodworking businesses, while others will be better for herbalists. It will be up to you to figure out where best to place your businesses to keep your production running and how to workaround shortages in one market by getting them from other markets.

The decision to go through with the separation of the markets will also affect multiple other aspects of the game. Walking distances between buildings will get more important, therefore the real world time a day in the game takes will be increased as well as building times for items. Also, AI transporters will learn to make more sensible decisions on where to get their items from depending on item prices and walking distance, to some degree this will also affect your automated transporters.

As you might already suppose these are a lot of changes to be done in one patch, so we will probably not get the balancing of travel times, build times, prices, and market stocks completely right with the first patch and we hope for your feedback on where we will still need to tweak the systems a little bit to make the game the best economy experience it can be. Even though it is quite a big change at this point in development, we still feel it is a necessary step to further improve the game and make the economy gameplay more interesting as well as opening up new playstyles.

That’s it for today’s dev diary. We hope you are excited for the changes to come and if you have further questions about this system, feel free to ask them here and we will do our best to address those.

Thank you for your ongoing support and feedback for the game!

The Guild 3 Team

Build number: 598094

Hi all!

Here’s another small but important update. Today we fixed two very nasty bugs:

- The “Could not initialize the graphics subsystem” bug which was more likely to happen when playing on a tv, should now be fixed. Please let us know if you still have issues with the error message stated above.
- There is still one case left in which you could run into that problem: When the resolution is below 1280x720 on an older graphics card the game will still display the "graphics subsystem" error message. In these cases make sure to update the graphics cards drivers and set the resolution on the monitor to a minimum of 1280x720 before starting the game.

- We fixed that almost all of the UIs were not catching mouse input correctly which lead the game to select characters and buildings in the 3D world behind the UI. This was obviously pretty annoying so we got rid of it!

All the best and have fun playing!