The Guild 3 News

Build number: 617778

Hello everyone!

Originally planned as an Easter surprise for you, we decided to launch the brand new scenario map of "Dijon" together with the bugfixes for the multiplayer lobby and the reconnection to existing multiplayer games.
Please inform us if you still have trouble with the lobby and the initialization of your mp games. We will continue to work on the multiplayer and bring out more optimizations in the coming patches.

Patch EA 0.9.13.5 includes the following content and following bug fixes:
- the brand new scenario map of "Dijon", capital of the Duchy of Burgundy!
- fixed a bug in the multiplayer lobby, that gave false reports about the fill-state of mp games - players tried to join a game but the response of those lobbies was sometimes: "maximum number of participants already reached"
- the log-in and log-out process of clients has been optimized - before that the process sometimes time out and the client received the notification that the connection has been lost
- the reconnection process to existing mp games has been optimized - like with the log-in and log-out process, the reconnection to existing games was sometimes not possible due to false responses (“unable to connect”) or timeouts

We hope you enjoy the spring in the Duchy of Burgundy, in singleplayer or in multiplayer with your friends!

Build number: 616535

Hello everyone!

Thanks a lot for your immense help with locating and hunting down the crash bugs in EA 0.9.13. Your save games and dumps steered us to the sources of the issues!
Save games from EA 0.9.13 should be loadable with this version. All save games you have provided us for this bug hunt are working fine again.

Regarding the annoying bug in the multiplayer lobby: we are on it! Please be a bit more patient. We will deliver a separate patch once the bug has been nailed down.

This hotfix however includes the following bug fixes:
- Fixed a crash in the tutorial when producing offspring
- Fixed several crashes when loading a save game
- Fixed a crash when setting up transport routes
- Fixed a bug in the storage rules where the procure settings did not respect the max storage settings and the transporter procured endlessly intermediate products

Known Issues
- The game might still crash in rare instances when going back to the main menu. We need more time to fix this bug. It will be rolled out with the next version.
- Although we fixed a few instances of items duplication for this patch, items can still be duplicated when dragging them from one employee/family member to another employee/family member inside the building windows (business, market, residence). We are on it.

Thank you all for your patience!

Build number: 615853

Hello everyone!
With patch EA 0.9.13 we are going to give you the reins for your businesses into your hand: you can now manage each single worker manually - if you’d like to do so! And you can allow/forbid the auto-equip routine for the master AI of your businesses, which has equipped your transporters with backpacks and carts even when you haven't seen the benefit in that.
A main focus has been set on improving usability, stability and performance of the game in single- and multiplayer to make the overall playing experience better. To achieve this, we invested a lot of time in fixing bugs and we made bigger reworks of existing features like the production, the budget book and the supply transporters.
A lot of effort has been put into balancing as well - most noticeable in the changes regarding influence gain and costs, and in the prices for titles, buildings and their addons. We will continue to balance the game until you and we are happy with the results.
The complete soundscape of the game has been reworked. A lot of sounds had to be changed or replaced completely, and all maps had to be reworked as well. Like with the balancing of the game, this is just an intermediate step until we reach a state with which we and you are satisfied. We value your opinion a lot so please give us your feedback to the recent changes in the survey (see below) or in the forums.

New features
- Individual Production:
-- Manual assignment: With the individual production, every single worker can work on a manually assigned product or action. By dragging the desired product or action directly on the worker, the workers start producing only this product or performing only this action no matter in which production mode the whole building is. Note: The workers who have such an individual task don’t produce any intermediate products, thus you must make sure that the rest of the employees support this individual worker.
-- Productivity bonus: In case you don't rely on the automated production and use the manual production, manual looped production or individual production, a small productivity bonus is given to the respective workers as they are more motivated by these personal instructions. This small bonus is applied to workers who perform business actions, too!
-- Residence: Children and adults can now perform their tasks in parallel in the residence, no matter how many orders have been placed.
- Guards of the Sovereign: The sovereign has two bodyguards and two guards for their main residence.
- Political Offices:
-- As an office holder in the chamber of the "town henchmen", you are now able to send away a city guard. The city guard will then head for the marketplace to see what is going on there, while you can do whatever you please without the watchful eyes of the city's constables.
-- You can now withdraw from office-applications in case you don’t want to go that political career path anymore.
- Prison and trials:
-- Accused workers who are imprisoned or waiting for a trial can not be fired anymore. From now on, your business will be affected if one of your employees gets caught...
- Options:
-- Auto-equip of transporters: In the options menu, you can now find a setting to enable/disable the functionality that auto-equips your transporters with a backpack or cart. This way, you can have full manual control about the equipment of your transporters if you wish. By default, the auto-equip is deactivated in the options.
-- Edge scrolling: The camera panning when the mouse is near the window border has become optional. This should help those of you who are playing the game in windowed mode or on systems with more than one screen. By default, the edge scrolling is turned off.
- Character and building focus: In case you’ve lost the selected character or building out of sight, you can focus the camera on them again by double clicking on the portrait icon in the lower left corner (the currently selected character or building).

Content & Balancing
- Production:
-- Several smaller optimizations and bug fixes have been done in the production to give you better feedback.
-- Storage rules: In manual looped production, transporters do not automatically sell intermediate goods above the minimum storage limit. You have to manually set the max storage limit to make them sell the goods. This new behavior leads to a more optimized production flow as intermediates are now more frequently on stock than in previous versions.
-- Gathering: Characters who are manually sent to gather resources can do this now without the need of unpausing them.
-- Warehouses: Transporters of warehouses don't immediately sell the intermediate items anymore and instead consider the needs of your businesses first.
- Supply caravans:
-- Improved the handling of the distance between supply transporters and their guards.
-- The frequency of supply transporters has been reduced to avoid maps crowded with horse carts.
- Budget book:
-- The budget book received a complete overhaul. You should now have a more detailed list of all your expenses for your businesses, rented resource providers and your family.
-- Also the score section (former winning points) has been completely reworked.
-- Several bugs in the budget book were fixed during that rework.
- Balancing:
-- Buildings and building addons are more expensive now. The building conditions (health) have been balanced and the building conditions can now be upgraded through new building addons. The bonuses of building addons have been reworked, as well as the numbers of available building addons per building.
-- The influence gain of several actions has been reduced, while the influence costs for titles and for some skills have been reduced. The influence gain for office holders has been reworked as well.
-- Some of the more powerful actions, especially the actions to gain influence, now have a family wide cooldown. So if one family member performs the action, the cooldown counts for all members of the family.
-- The costs for the actions "Church donation", "Oil the wheels of bureaucracy", "Bribe an official" and "Send to the court of the monarch" now increase with your title. While in the beginning you pay just a few coins, those actions will become a lot more expensive when you reach a higher rank.
-- The privilege to lease mines, quarries and/or lumberyards is now granted with the citizen title. And you find a new icon in the action bar of those resource providers which gives you access to the map-wide lease menu.
- Soundscape:
-- The sounds of birds, crickets, wolves and so on are now played with a frequency set for each sound sphere separately.
-- The sound spheres for villages, towns and marketplaces now have several variations which are randomly played. The transition from no-sound to sound is obvious at some marketplaces when you move the camera towards a marketplace. We are working on that and hope to have a much smoother transition in one of the coming patches.
-- Footstep sounds and sounds of horse carts should be less penetrant and annoying now.
-- The sound volume for incoming notifications has been reduced.
- AI families and NPCs now have a different logic for using the horse carts. This leads to a smaller amount of horse carts on the map.
- Characters who are buying or selling at the marketplace are now occupying defined positions in front of the markets and are thus crowding the area in front of the markets a bit less.
- Ships now create effects on the water when they are sailing.
- The display of name plaques of buildings and characters has been improved. They are now only shown until a certain distance to avoid maps crowded with text.
- Achievements have been reworked and adapted to the latest changes in the game. This task is still in progress and minor changes still need to be done. Some maps are not released and thus the respective achievement can’t be unlocked for the time being.

Bug fixes
- Performance: several improvements to the performance in single- and multiplayer were made
- Stability: Fixed several crashes in single- and multiplayer - they are becoming less and less :-)
- Multiplayer: Fixed several bugs with synchronization in multiplayer
- fixed two bugs that made transporters or their horse carts turn invisible
- fixed a bug where unconscious characters could not be selected (correction of the hitbox)
- Chat:
-- a small exclamation mark icon notifies you now about new chat messages
-- the chat now “jumps” to the most recent message to make it easier to follow the conversation
- fixed a bug where the order list in the production did not update after unlocking a new skill or upgrading a building
- fixed a bug where characters held items while they were using a hand cart, a riding horse or a horse cart
- fixed a bug where characters held items while they were visiting the tavern or the barber.
- fixed a bug where the user needed to have the double amount of money to unlock a building add-on
- fixed a wrong message when the player tried to equip items that were not suitable for the character
- fixed a bug where high level businesses made too little money
- fixed a bug where the spouse and the heir did not have all icons correctly displayed in the family tree
- fixed a bug where the market window did not open when a henchman entered the market
- fixed a bug where characters did interact with dead characters - this is a game about the late middle ages and not a fantasy game :-)
- fixed a bug where several actions failed when the worker was too far away from the home business
- removed the needless add-on tab from rented resource providers
- fixed a bug where the items you had selected (in the upper left part of the production menu) to be part of your automated production were not saved
- fixed a bug where the summoning action lead to wrong numbers of received items
- fixed several bugs where characters could get stuck (paths, bridges)
- fixed several bugs with the display of ships
- fixed the broken conquer building action
- fixed a bug where people were sleeping outside of the market
- fixed a bug where the bomb was thrown into the wrong direction on the client in multiplayer
- fixed a bug in the tutorial where already read texts were not displayed anymore
- fixed a bug in the tutorial where the scroll position did not get reset
- fixed a bug where several notifications did not get triggered (e.g. an employee has died)
- fixed a bug where adopting children in the church failed
- fixed a bug with toddlers being stuck in the church after losing the residence
- fixed the missing intro on the Augsburg map
- fixed a bug where certain skills were missing on the Augsburg map
- fixed a bug with a too high bonus for the skull lamp and the rose water
- fixed a bug where dead family members were still displayed in the residence
- fixed a bug where items in production could already be equipped
- fixed a bug where characters paid for services although the waiting time timed out
- fixed a bug where the change place of residence could be performed for free although it should have cost 200 coins
- fixed a bug where a building window didn’t open under special circumstances
- fixed a bug where the portrait colors of the spouse did not get updated after the wedding
- fixed a bug with the character list filters in the business window not getting updated correctly
- an exclamation mark appeared without content in several places of the game - that has been fixed
- several building models have been reworked to fix bugs in the structure, in the texture, with the shadows or the LODs
- a lot of character models were reworked to fix bugs with the skinning or with animations
- a number of sounds were missing on several maps, like the cuckoo or the magpie
- several misplaced props have been fixed on all maps
- port and school on the Prague map had no name
- fixed several instances of missing texts and made many text fixes for English and German loca
- fixed some dozen more small bugs not mentioned in this list

Known issues
- Score: the calculations of the points for offices and for the main residence are not yet finalized
- Achievements: the three score points achievements are not yet finalized

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 in the FAQs Multiplayer on our webpage as well!
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 uninstalling 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
Bug fixes, bug fixes, bug fixes, plus balancing and SFX. And maybe a brand new scenario map :-)

A short outlook...
We will further work on balancing and the soundscape of the game and we will focus on improvements for the AI. Fixing bugs will stay our highest priority at the moment, but we are also starting to make plans for a brand new rogue profession...

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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 0.9.13: 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.

Greetings, fellow Guildians!

We just wanted to give you a short update about the long awaited patch EA 0.9.13, which should have been released already.
As we are writing these lines, the version EA 0.9.13 is just a few hours away from being moved into our internal stabilizing environment. There, it will be undergoing extensive testing and if our QA does not find any major issues, it will go live in the first week of March.
Patch EA 0.9.13 has grown to one of our larger patches so far. While mainly focussing on fixing bugs and on balancing, we have reworked some features as well.

Thank you all for your support and patience!

Hello everyone! In DevDiary #16 Part 1 we want to give you some insight into the Multiplayer mode of The Guild 3, how it works, what challenges we are facing and how we are approaching them.

Before we dig deeper into the multiplayer mode, we want to briefly shift to another topic: we are aware that a lot of questions about the editor have come up recently. We would like to tell you that, while the editor is still something we are planning to release, it will not happen before the game is finished. The editor is still undergoing changes as we progress with the production of the game.

Now, let's head back to the topic of this DevDiary. First, we want to give you a short overview of the general architecture. The Guild 3 uses the very common Client-Server architecture. One player (the one who starts the game) gets a special Host (also known as Server) role assigned which means their instance of the game gets to decide what is happening in the game world. The other players are Clients who need to send requests to the Host to influence the game.
For example, if a Client wants to send one of their characters to attack someone else, they will send a request to the Host that basically says “Please, execute action Attack with Alice on target Bob”. The Host will then verify the request and check if Alice is able to start this action (e.g. Alice is not sitting in jail currently and Bob can be attacked). If the request is valid, the Host will start the process of executing the attack. The first step in the process is to send Alice to run towards Bob. The Host will then broadcast to all Clients what has changed. The changes will list for example: “Alice now has an action Attack with target Bob. Alice is now running towards Bob.” As the action gets executed over time, the host will broadcast additional updates such as “Alice has reached her destination and is now standing at position X. Alice is now playing the animation punch. The hitpoints of Bob are now 20.”

So to sum it up, a Client sends requests to the Host that describe the actions that they wish to perform. The Host will validate the requests and inform all clients via broadcast messages which changes have occurred in the world.

Ongoing challenges
There are two primary challenges for making the Multiplayer mode run stable and reliably. In the past, we have had many problems related to these two topics. And even now we are still struggling with them from time to time, since they are related to how the underlying networking system works in The Guild 3 and are very hard to solve completely.

In today’s DevDiary, we want to focus on the first issue, which is a very technical one. For Host and Client to be able to communicate effectively, they need to have a shared knowledge about which characters exist in the world. In the example above, they were sending messages about the characters Alice and Bob. For this to work, both have to have a list of all the characters that exist in the world. Both have to know that in the current world there exists Alice, Bob, Charly, Dave, etc. And this list can change because characters can die and new ones can be born. So at some point in time, the Host will need to send a message to all Clients that says: “There is a new character Eve. She stands at position X, has brown hair and is wearing a commoner’s garb (as well as all the other things there are to know about Eve).” Everyone needs to remember about Eve so that when a later message arrives that says “Eve has changed her clothes and is now wearing plate mail”, all the Clients know what to do and display Eve in the new piece of armor.

When things go wrong, it can happen that a Client has forgotten about Eve and does not know what needs to happen when a message mentions Eve. Depending on the case it can go unnoticed for a while, but in the worst case these situations can crash the game. Of course, this issue exists not only for characters, but also for buildings, trees, items and all the cog wheels that make The Guild 3 work.

This type of problem is notoriously hard to diagnose and fix. Usually, when we encounter a crash related to this, it is already too late to understand what went wrong. For example, imagine a crash that happens because a Client received a message that says “Alice is now running towards Eve” and the Client does not know who Eve is. To fix the issue we need to find out why the Client does not remember Eve and when they forgot about her. At the point in time when the game crashed, this can be hard to find out.

The most reliable tool we have to solve such issues are log files. In a log file, we can record a history of changes that happened in the game. Whenever a character dies or a new character is born, an entry is added to the log file. If we have a log file for such a game session that crashed, then we can look into the history and find out at what time Eve was forgotten. Based on that it is usually possible to find out where things went wrong and fix the bug. We have made good progress at finding and solving many of these issues, but from time to time we still find some, so our work is not fully done yet.

We hope this DevDiary gives you a rough idea how the Multiplayers mode works. In the next DevDiary we will continue with the Multiplayer topic and explain another issue that is difficult to solve. Stay tuned for part 2 in March!