The Guild 3
Patch notes for version EA 0.7.5.1 – April 9th, 2019
We just deployed an update to fix issues that came up with 0.7.5. Here are the things we changed.
- Fixed a bug that caused the years per round to change back to 4 years after saving and loading a game.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when a kidnapped character was released.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash under certain circumstances when conquering a building.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to create way more animals than actually set in the editor (eg. Paris 6400 animals …)
We also did a few things to improve performance:
- Animations are now only started if they aren’t playing already.
- Positions of the handcarts are not using the street to check the positioning anymore.
- Game logic is now only updated once per frame.
Thanks for your feedback and patience!
Patch notes for version EA 0.7.5 – April 5th, 2019
Hi all! We just released EA 0.7.5! This patch is a bit lighter than the previous one, as we are currently reworking the politics system in the game, which is a big chunk of work. Nevertheless we are pretty excited to hear your feedback on the changes we implemented.
New features
- As requested by you, the community, we added an option to the game that, if enabled, levels up your employees automatically. You can find the option in the options menu at the bottom. The game will automatically distribute stat points based on the profession of the employee. The option is disabled by default.
- Currently as the game is progressing year by year, the whole family progression is really slow as it takes a while until you can start playing with your children. So we added a feature that you all probably know from previous Guild titles: Years per round. From now on you are able to define how many years should pass at the end of every round (24 hours). The default amount of years per round is set to 4. Your characters will age accordingly. Actions, trials, etc. will be correctly scheduled. As mentioned you have full control on how fast you want to play. If you prefer playing 1 year per round you can still do that by defining it before starting a game.
Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
Balancing
- Fleas don’t inflict damage anymore. Also the chance of spreading has been reduced and a cooldown has been added as well. Spreading fleas can also not be automated anymore in the residence. So if you want your kids to release fleas you need to select your targets manually.
- The summon action needs to be performed in a cemetery now. Being successful, nice items from far away can be obtained but there is a chance that others see you. If that happens your reputation will go down. If the action fails, you may even receive damage.
- The send courtier to the monarch action has been fixed and changed. The dispatched character will be sent away for 3 rounds (days). When that character returns your family will be rewarded with influence and your character with buffs. A child can only be sent to the monarch once.
- You can now send your kids to school. School lasts for 2 rounds (days) and at the end you will be rewarded with influence and the kid will earn XP and a random permanent buff on one of the base attributes.
- The insult action has been fixed and works differently now. Insulting a character will, on success, make the insulted attack you (and therefore commit a crime). If the action fails, your reputation will be reduced with the character and surroundings.
- The duration of a round has been decreased in order to have speedier gameplay.
- Ambushers will now also try to rob poorer characters. Their ambush area has also been increased.
- Results and rewards have been reworked for trips overseas.
- Sleeping now increases health regeneration. Sleeping over 6 hours gives the character a slight productivity buff.
- The rewards for jugglery, begging and boasting are now depending on how many characters are around.
- Sabotaging a building will not set it on fire anymore. It will reduce customer satisfaction and productivity.
- Vandalize is now reducing customer satisfaction only.
- Starting attributes for guards have been reduced so rogues have an easier life from the start.
- Reputation bonus and bargaining bonus have been slightly changed if the lucky stone item is equipped.
- Income generated by employees through actions is now shown under “other income” in the budget book.
- Cooldowns and durations have been changed for lots of actions.
- The minimum time you have to be in an alliance before you can dissolve it again has been removed.
- We removed the passive way of selling buildings (sell building action) as it was very buggy and as buildings can be purchased via the dynasty trade and directly when selecting a building, we deemed it as not necessary anymore to spend time on fixing that.
- Selling items doesn’t provide XP anymore as this was highly exploitable particularly when selling items of high value. In order for transporters to still be able to level up, they are now getting XP for finishing transportation routes.
- The bargaining bonus has been changed. From now on it’s not possible to sell items more expensive than the purchasing price at the market anymore.
- Item trading has been removed from the dynasty trade as it was bypassing the transportation system and it created lots of edge cases related to inventory space.
- We removed the following actions as they were not working properly and didn’t make too much sense as well: Spy on character, give gift (we will compensate that with artifact actions), give money.
- The stats of the short sword and the long sword have been adjusted.
- The profit margin of the market has been increased to 20%.
- The “Gambeson” armor’s reputation bonus has been decreased from 300% to 3%.
- A lot of buildable grounds in all scenario maps have been reworked. Besides, all villages are larger now so that you, as well as you AI opponents, have more free space to enlarge your business empire.
Art
- Currently we are going over all the props in the game and create additional “level of detail” levels for them, so we can improve the game’s performance particularly when the camera is far away or you are looking into far into the distance.
Performance and stability
- We fixed when objects in the world are casting shadows. Before objects were casting shadows, even if they were very far away from the camera, which of course resulted in lower performance.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a crash bug which occurred when the budget book was opened for too long.
- Fixed a bug in the rendering that crashed the game.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash under certain circumstances while conquering a building.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the AI tried to appoint a new heir.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when a character is returning from a trip overseas after loading a save game.
- Fixed a bug that caused guards to attack the character who defends themselves instead of the character who did something illegal.
- Fixed a bug that caused the upper left dynasty HUD elements to be hidden, when an action was applied on one of the character portraits.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to sometimes hide the selected character UI when a character is in an indoor scene.
- Fixed a bug that caused a character to instantly die when they are sent on a trip overseas from Paris.
- Fixed a bug that caused robbers to not bring the stolen items back to the camp.
- Fixed a bug that caused the building placement tooltip to stick to the mouse cursor after building placement has been cancelled by a right-click.
- Fixed a bug that prevented you to attack enemies who are conquering a building.
- Fixed a bug that caused family members to switch to another family when they are in a building that is sold to another dynasty.
- Fixed a bug that caused far trade opportunities to not be removed after the time for the event is over.
- Fixed a bug that caused the “Show Top 5” button in the statistics UI to not work correctly.
- The outer side of parts of the city walls of Warsaw faced to the inside. This has been fixed.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not react on the ESC key in certain UIs.
- Fixed a bug that caused the text in loading screen tooltips to be cut off.
- Fixed a bug that caused one of the poor houses to not show the dynasty flag.
- Fixed a bug that caused legal and illegal actions to show the wrong color.
- Fixed lots of localization bugs in notifications.
Known issues
- Right now if you are taking over buildings through inheritance - e.g. marry the heir of a dynasty before it's leader dies somehow... - the “obtained” buildings aren't showing the correct flag anymore.
- Animals are missing animations, exception: riding horse, horse-darwn cart.
Multiplayer progress
Multiplayer is not yet enabled as it’s still very very buggy and we didn’t make all systems multiplayer ready yet. Nevertheless we want to share our progress with you.
- Characters, buildings etc. weren’t synced over the network. It took us quite some effort but now all objects are synced, animations are shown also on clients and pathfinding works correctly.
- Floating texts are now also shown correctly on the host and the clients.
- Before, character ID's were represented via a simple integer which is synced at the start of the game and then each client auto increments their local copy when creating a new character. That of course could have lead to ID clashes, that’s why we implemented randomly generated GUIDs.
- We implemented that the master AI is now also working correctly in multiplayer games. Data is synced correctly from Host to Clients. Automated characters are synced as well as budgets per business.
- We made the actor value and game effects system ready for multiplayer, so attributes of characters, status effects, etc. are properly synced over the network.
- The economy manager also had to be reworked in order to be able to be correctly simulated for all parties in a multiplayer game.
- All the city and neighborhood logic has been reworked in order to work correctly in multiplayer.
- Inhabitants of a city weren’t synced over the network which we now implemented. They will find the correct points of interest and conversations, fighting, etc. should now be handled correctly.
- The login screen has been refactored, so it’s possible to get into multiplayer sessions properly.
- We implemented now that lobbies can be properly created and are then also listed correctly in the open games UI.
- The UI that shows all the open lobbies wasn’t properly filled with data and didn’t react to connection issues. We changed that now, so lobbies are correctly shown.
- In order to be able to communicate with other players in the lobby we changed the character creation screen in multiplayer so you will have access to the chat there.
- We implemented that players are able to chat with each other in the lobby screen. The chat in game is not yet in but will soon be worked on.
- Additionally, we started to eliminate updates that are sent every frame in order to be able to increase the amount of concurrent players in a multiplayer session.
- The time architect is now handled only on the server in order to not have different weather on the clients.
- Notifications are now shown correctly on the server and on the different clients.
- We also made sure that the terrain is correctly synced between host and clients. While we were working on that, we also fixed a few bugs in that system to make it more stable and less error prone.
Important information
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “Games” in the installation directory of The Guild 3.
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...
What we are planning for the next patch
For the next patch we are planning to release the reworked politics and court system. As you can imagine this is pretty pretty big, but progress has been good so far. We hope you will like it.
A short outlook…
Once we are finished with politics, we want to finally tackle trade routes.
**********
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 0.7.5: 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.
Patch notes for version EA 0.7.4 – March 15th, 2019
Hi Everyone! Today we released EA 0.7.4! This version contains a changed dynastic trade system, improvements to make the AI more interesting, a big update on notifications, a bunch of new or improved UIs and a lot of bugfixes we think you were waiting on! Enjoy!
New features
- One of the biggest changes in this version is the whole diplomacy system. Before the AI was not engaging actively in dynastic trades. The logic behind what they wanted to trade was also not existent. With EA 0.7.4 the AI will actively send you trade requests once they have the appropriate title. The content of their trade proposals depends on what objectives they are currently following. Trade proposals are sent via urgent notifications (for more info, check out the notification entry below).
- So far the AI didn’t trigger feuds, didn’t make peace proposals or weren’t trying to get into alliances. We changed that. The AI will now declare feuds if it fits their objective. They will also ask for alliances. To make that more interesting we changed the way peace or alliances are forged. We moved those actions from being just actions in the action bar, to the dynasty trade. So from now on if you are in a feud you can only end it by accepting or making a peace proposal. The amount of compensation you have to pay or you can expect depends on the power balancing between the involved dynasties.
- As diplomacy starts to get slowly more interesting in the game and there was no way yet to get a notion of how is actually the relationship between the other dynasties, we decided to implement a UI element which you may be familiar with from other Guild games. From now on if you hover your mouse cursor over the crest of another dynasty (or your own) you will see relationship between all dynasties and the inspected dynasty.
- One big topic that was haunting us for a while now was the notification system. With EA 0.7.4 we implemented now 2 different types of notifications (general and urgent). We added voice overs and jingles to most of the notifications. There are a few different notifications categories (which can be identified by their icon) and every notification can either have green (positive), gray (neutral) or red (negative) background. This way you should be able to react faster.
-- General notifications: Those notifications will be shown only on the lower left and in the message log.
-- Urgent notifications: Those notifications are shown in the top center of your screen. They will remain for a predefined amount of time. If you click on an urgent notification it will take you to the point of interest. This can be a UI or an object in the 3D world. Urgent notifications will also be stored in your message log.
- If you have the feeling that you get too many notifications you can filter messages via the notification filter button on the lower left of your HUD. We extended that UI, so now it shows all the different categories with their respective icons.
- Another thing that we added is the new Action Comparison UI. From now on if you hover a target with an action a UI will show up on the bottom center. It will inform you about the target, the attributes that are influencing the dice roll and it will show the chance for success. The chance for success is now also directly shown next to the mouse cursor. The old comparison UI is gone.
- Another UI we changed is the dynasty window. Per dynasty you will now see the leader, spouse and heir but you can also open the family tree for every other dynasty. The former children section in the UI has been removed and instead you can see the list of all buildings of the selected dynasty. You will also see per building whether you are spying on the building or not. Also we moved the evidence section over to the dynasty UI.
- Wiping out a dynasty is a good thing. That’s why now as soon as one of the competitors loses, you will get a nice UI informing you about that.
- We also added a UI that informs you if one of your family members or the leader of a competitor died, so you are properly up to date.
- A new objective was added to the AI to follow: Increase Rank. When the AI gets the objective they will internally compare their winning points with the winning points of the other dynasties. They will try to increase their rank. The way they will try to do it mainly depends on their dynasty attitudes. So for example, aggressive dynasties will try to actively weaken dynasties with a higher amount of winning points.
- Another objective for the AI that we added is the “Increase Security” objective. If they follow that objective, the AI will start hiring henchmen and assign them to their duties.
- We extended the AI, so they are now properly reacting when their main residence was destroyed. They will try to build or buy a new residence and move the family in as quickly as possible.
- Narrator voice overs are now played when new titles are unlocked.
- Action tooltips are now also shown on actions in the production UI instead of just the name.
Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
Balancing
- The avatar starts with the age of 25.
- Many changes to the AI behavior.
- Changed the formula for conceiving a child.
- For the AI the decision to produce offspring is now dependent on their current objectives instead of just a regular interval.
- We tweaked lots of the sounds and how far they are played.
Art
- We completely changed the water in the game. It should have now a more natural look.
Performance and stability
- Animation code optimized. Unnecessary copying of data removed, and simplified simulations for simple animations.
- Objects that are not visible to the camera will now properly be marked as invisible. This gets rid of unnecessary particle animation, character animation, and plaque calculations.
- Unified all the picking functions into a single function. This reduces the times when pickable objects are calculated per frame from 3 to 1.
- Optimized building and character plaque rendering code to have a far smaller impact on performance.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if an action icon was not set up correctly.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if a building has been selected while the game was paused.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the player tries to hire a henchmen while the main residence is destroyed.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to “think” that the right mouse button is permanently pressed. This lead to weird selection behavior. That should be resolved now.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to block you from equipping an item if there is only one item slot available.
- Fixed a bug that caused the production window to block input for other windows while they are opened on top.
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to get stuck in the election scene if nothing is selected.
- Fixed a bug that caused the election scene to not show up properly when an election took place in which the player is supposed to vote.
- Fixed a bug that caused the trial scene to show the same crest for all characters despite being from different dynasties.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to leave prison instantly if they get involved just a moment before.
- Fixed a bug that caused condemned characters to leave prison before their sentence has ended.
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to get stuck in the prison scene because the leave button was missing.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to remain partly unusable after being released from prison.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters fall through bridges after a trial scene ended.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to freeze their animation when they were ambushed.
- Fixed a bug that caused gathering characters to stop their assigned tasks if they are interrupted by another action.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to not continue their task after being robbed.
- Fixed a bug that caused the progress bar not being shown correctly while the character was collecting herbs.
- Fixed a bug that caused the progress bar to not being shown when collecting water buckets.
- Fixed a bug that caused the ask alliance and end feud actions to not work properly with the AI.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to allow invalid positions for actions like begging, entertainment, etc.
- Fixed a bug that caused neutral businesses to hire an endless amount of workers and transporters.
- Fixed a bug that caused the building plaque of the windmill to move along with the buildings animation.
- Fixed a bug that caused the herb hut playing the wrong animations on characters outside of the building.
- Fixed a bug that caused NPCs to not level up their attributes correctly.
- Fixed a bug that caused the notification window to not show up when a new title is purchased.
- Fixed a bug that caused employees to lose their clothes items after saving and loading a game.
- Fixed a bug that caused the walking stick item to not grant the movement speed boni correctly.
- Fixed a bug that caused buildings to still show dead family member character plaques.
- Fixed a bug that caused henchmen to spawn in front of the main residence instead of the building they were hired for.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to produce endlessly despite an amount having being defined.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to still play their working animations while they are moving.
- Fixed a bug that caused lamp posts to not be properly lit.
- Fixed a bug that town hall, port, cemetery and lumberyard are not shown on the area map.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to keep playing the thunderstorm sound after entering and leaving a scene.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the wrong tooltip while hovering an assigned action in the production UI.
- Fixed a bug that caused the street highlighting (space key) not being removed after the window lost focus.
- Fixed the difficulty settings. They were inverted, that’s why you got more gold if you were playing on impossible.
- Fixed a bug that caused an attacking character to be teleported to the destination of the attacked victim (if the attack was executed on a transporter).
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the tenure of office to not show the correct number.
- Fixed a number of text bugs.
Known issues
- The election UI looks very broken at the moment. We are currently working on the politics system so issues like this one should soon be history.
- If you play the scenario map Paris and decide to go on a long distance journey, your character will instantly die. We found the bug and will fix it for the next patch.
Important information
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “Games” in the installation directory of The Guild 3.
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...
What we are planning for the next patch
For the next patch we are currently working intensively on the politics and voting system. We will particularly focus on getting privileges working decently and we are currently also thinking about new political actions that you can execute if you are holding a respective office. We also want to deliver a first iteration of the tutorial, so you have an easier time getting into the game.
A short outlook…
We want to move our focus on trade routes, storage management and economy refinement.
**********
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 0.7.4: 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.
Patch notes for version EA 0.7.3.1 – February 22nd, 2019
Hi all,
We just deployed a little update to resolve a few issues that you helped us identify in EA 0.7.3. That’s what we fixed:
- Fixed a bug that caused the leader to become unresponsive when certain actions were assigned to the leader in a specific manner.
- Fixed a bug that caused overly motivated lansquenets to always pick the same building for “asking” for protection. They will now only damage the building on critical failure. On failure only productivity is reduced.
- We changed the way repair costs are calculated. Before everything in the building (characters, items, add-ons) was included in calculating the repair price. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, so we changed it; the repair costs are just dependent on the maximum health points and the current health points of the building.
- Fixed a bug that caused buildings to become unrepairable if the repair confirmation pop-up was closed by using Esc or the right mouse button.
- Fixed a bug that caused the loading screen to disappear too early when loading a map.
Thank you all for the feedback on EA 0.7.3 so far!
Patch notes for version EA 0.7.3 – February 15th, 2019
As already mentioned in our last community update we were skipping the EA 0.7.2 version. All the changes we had in the EA 0.7.2 are included in the EA 0.7.3 version. We are all very excited about your feedback as we changed and added a lot in EA 0.7.3. The combat system and most of the related actions (eg. guarding) were completely reworked. You will see the first draft of our new AI system in the game. We added new life into the game by adding scenario intros, lots of sounds and voice overs. There are lots of other changes in that version as well, which you can check-out in the patch notes below. Have fun!
New features
- We completely reworked the combat system. Characters can now join fights or even start fights with multiple characters. So no more just 1 on 1 fights.
- With the new combat system characters that fall below a certain healthpoint threshold are not dying but are getting unconscious and cannot take part in the fight anymore. After a fight is over the character will stay unconscious until a certain amount of health points have been regenerated. While a character is unconscious, the character cannot defend himself or herself anymore. There are now some actions that can ONLY be executed on unconscious characters.
- Multiple parties are now able to join a fight. For instance city guards will now join a fight on the side of the character who reacted on an illegal action. Also guarding (building, area or character) lansquenets or henchmen are joining battles now. To make it easier to see who’s fighting for whom all characters of the opponent side are getting a red circle while the fight is ongoing.
- A fight ends if all characters of one side are unconscious. The still standing and victorious characters can then apply post combat actions on the poor fellows on the ground.
- The pre and post combat UI window was completely removed as it was first very interrupting (particularly if you had lots of thieves/robbers) and second it created lots of issues for multiplayer games.
-- Before a combat starts the target checks whether it should try to flee or fight. If the character decides to flee, a dice roll is executed. If successful the character runs away. If not, then the fight is started. The surrender action was removed.
-- After a victory you can now select the actions Steal, Break Bones, Kill or Kidnap (depending on your character) in the action menu (Attack category) and apply the action you want on the unconscious character.
- We also changed that attacking someone is finally illegal. So be careful where you attack someone, guards will not pass by without joining the fight.
- Henchmen who are assigned to guard a character or building will also join fights if the guarded building is under attack or if the protected character attacks or is attacked.
- The armor system changed as well now. There is a new derivative attribute called damage reduction, which reduces the amount of damage taken.
- With EA 0.7.3 we generally added that characters when they die are showing a death animation and are not just vanishing like they did before.
- We entirely reworked and fixed the sound system in the game as well. The game before felt really dead without all the ambient and sound effects. We added now sounds to most of the actions, to all scenario maps and buildings and we will add more in the future. Additionally we added voice sets for children and three different sets for male and female characters. As a next step we are going to implement the narrator voice overs to the game.
- As you all know we are not very happy with what the AI is doing or rather not doing in the game. Therefore we started implementing a new AI system into the game. With EA 0.7.3 you can experience the first iteration of the AI objective system. We of course will keep working on that in the following sprints.
-- The moral alignments of the AI were changed from 6 different values to 3 different values. The moral alignments of dynasties when starting the game will be mainly dependent on their select profession. The moral alignments will further change depending on the actions the AI is executing.
-- From now on the AI will use all their family members to execute actions.
-- The AI will now select the skills they want to unlock based on their moral values.
-- The AI will now follow objectives. The objectives they select are also dependent on their moral values. The objectives they follow are influencing the actions the AI wants to execute. The type of objectives available for the AI are depending on the current title of a dynasty. This way we want to make sure that the AI is shifting their focus, the more powerful they get.
-- The AI will now also react on immediate loss threats like being out of money, missing an heir or having no house.
- We added a new lose condition to the game. So from now on you can lose from getting bankrupt. So ongoing costs like salaries will actually NOT be capped at 0 anymore but will get your account below 0. If you are not getting back into the black numbers within a year, the game is lost. To make all that more transparent we are added a warning UI that shows you what’s threatening you and how long you have still time to solve it.
- In all the scenarios you are now getting a short intro sequence, fully narrated based on the scenario settings.
- From now on NPC Citizens will take hold of office positions if there are no dynasty applicants. From now on all offices are having an office holder from the very beginning.
- The change mentioned above finally allowed us to setup the desired starting conditions for your scenarios. We removed all the already existing AI dynasties and their buildings from all maps. All AI dynasties will be freshly created at game start and will now have the same starting conditions like the player. As a result there is now more space for buildings to be placed and the amount of opponents you select in the map settings will be correct.
- For the kidnapping action we added a selection UI for buildings (similar to the romance windows) so you can decide where to chain a hostage.
- With the new version the UI will now scale correctly with your screen resolution.
- We exchanged the previous font with a new font. First we wanted to make all the text more readable and second we wanted to use a font that covers all the necessary characters of other languages.
- You can now also see a new notification overview window which shows all the notifications you received. We are still working on the notifications, so soonish that feature should become more useful.
- We also made some small changes on the politics system. From now on applying for an office costs influence. Additionally we fixed the UI to correctly show what’s the highest office seat within a chamber.
- Since a lot of feedback came in regarding the micro management of the whole family we also added the possibility to your home residence, to assign ongoing actions to your family members. This way you only need to micro-manage them if you want to.
- In our survey for patch EA 0.7.1 a lot of you reported that you had a hard time figuring out what actions help you gain influence. We added the influence you receive when successfully executing the action to the “Rewards” section of the action’s tooltip.
- The actionbar categories now show 10 icons per page instead of 5 to more effectively use the space we have.
Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
New features under hood
- Designers are now able to define which action can be shown in which building. This way we are now able to lock/unlock actions for residential buildings and businesses without changing it in the code.
- Designers are now able to create actions that affect not just source (the executor of an action) and target but select two different targets. With that new feature we are able to create actions like “Spread rumors about a dynasty”, which decreases the relationship between two other dynasties.
Balancing
- All the equipment related to combat had been rebalanced to support the new combat system. Weapons and armor are now way more powerful and it’s absolutely recommended to equip your characters well before taking up a fight with a city guard.
- All the producible items in the garrison and the thieves hideout were moved to other buildings.
- Prices for titles and skills have been adjusted.
- Hiring employees is now more expensive.
- The start base budget for businesses has been increased.
- Adjusted the XP gained from executing actions.
- Adjusted the prices for a lot of the henchmen specific actions.
- Adjusted some effects of actions
Content
- A new action was added for thieves: game of dice. It’s a legal action that allows your thieves to make coins from playing with unsuspecting citizens.
- Every character should now start with a starting clothing item equipped. Citizens should wear the proper items for the clothes they are wearing.
Performance and stability
- We changed the way the game is picking objects in the 3D world. All the props and fauna in the game is not considered anymore while the game is checking for pickable objects under the mouse cursor.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the home residence was demolished.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if the main residence burned down.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if there were too many evidences to be traded in the dynasty trade UI.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if the clothes of a dead character were selected.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when a henchman executes the conquer building action.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash upon using the spying action with a henchman.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash after the trial of an employee finished.
- Fixed a bug that caused transporters to take a transporter slot in a building that they were visiting.
- Fixed a bug that caused buildings to not look like their according building level.
- Fixed a bug that actions, like break into building, are opening the interieur scene when applied on a building.
- Fixed that NPCs and AI dynasties are not repairing their buildings. Now they are repairing their buildings if they can afford it.
- Fixed a bug that caused NPC adults to attack NPC children. That’s not happening anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused to show different relationship values on characters and the character selection screen.
- Fixed a bug that caused the amount of unread notifications to not show up anymore.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the player from exiting a scenario as the “Yes” button was missing the first time the UI was opened.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to not die even if they are below 0 health points.
- Fixed a bug that allowed characters to use office actions despite not having the office anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show pistol and crossbow animations anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused guards to not react properly when they are the victim of the pickpocket action.
- Fixed a bug that prevents ambushes to happen below bridges.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to spawn below the surface in Augsburg.
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to not get influence for their office position.
- Fixed a bug that caused the selection circle of a character to vanish after loading a map.
- Fixed a bug that caused family members to always select the same target for the “drive your workers” action.
- Fixed a bug that caused the intro music to be played before the sound settings are loaded.
- Fixed a bug that caused the overall volume setting to do nothing.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to take over changed sound settings without hitting the confirm button.
- Fixed a bug that players had to restart the game to apply sound settings.
- Fixed a bug that caused some sounds to still play despite all volume controls have been set to 0.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to zoom on double clicking.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the last item produced tooltip when hovering the mouse cursor over the currently active action icon.
- Fixed a bug that caused the illegal and legal colors to be shown incorrectly.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to allow all members of a family to leave a guild.
- Fixed a bug that caused transporters to not being fireable.
- Fixed a bug that caused the kidnap action to show the success animation despite the action was actually a failure.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the “Chain Hostage in Backroom” action from successfully finishing.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not unlock the correct amount of businesses in the career mode.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to create NPCs whenever someone used the praise action on an inn, without destroying them afterwards.
- Fixed a bug that caused percentage values to not being shown correctly in tooltips.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to prevent the player from visiting their own herb huts and hospitals.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to stop the current weather after visiting an interieur scene.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not remove selection circles of employees after the associated building was destroyed.
- Fixed a bug that caused the character to not being illuminated correctly in the inspection window if water animations are enabled …
- Fixed a bug that caused transporters to not go to the market and buy certain ingredients.
- Fixed a bug that caused the new leader of a dynasty to be teleported to their home residence after the previous leader was killed.
- Fixed a bug that caused the avatar, spouse and heir quick selection UI panels to overlap each other on starting a map.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the spouse twice in the quick selection UI if the spouse is also appointed as the heir.
- Fixed a bug that prevented the player to manually end a relationship by using the end relationship action.
Known issues
- All office privileges were removed for now as none of the actions were working properly. We will assess the whole system and as soon as it’s properly working we’ll introduce those actions again.
Important information
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “Games” in the installation directory of The Guild 3.
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...
What we are planning for the next patch
For the next patch we want to further improve the AI and update the notification system to support urgent notifications.
A short outlook…
The focus right now is on the dynasty AI but we will also start working on the politics and law system, as we want to make the offices more useful.
**********
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 0.7.3: 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.
Where is Patch EA 0.7.2 and why it takes longer
You were probably wondering when we are going to release EA 0.7.2, as almost a month passed already since we launched EA 0.7.1. Don’t worry next week we are going to release the next version: EA 0.7.3. Some of you may ask why we are skipping one version and instead release a different one. We want to answer that question in this short update.
So to give you some kind of context. We are usually working on several development streams in parallel in order to be able to:
a) Not overload one version, as it’s way harder to stabilize it.
b) Have more development time, particularly for bigger features.
Internally we have a pretty big setup (automated deployment, ticket scheduling, etc.) to be able to work on different streams simultaneously. Usually that works pretty well and our release cycle has been quite stable. So finally, what happened to EA 0.7.2. Originally we, of course, wanted to deliver EA 0.7.2 to steam already 2 weeks ago, but circumstances prevented that and we had to make a decision. We made changes and bugfixes for the same feature set in 2 different development streams (EA 0.7.2. and EA 0.7.3), which resulted in conflicts that would have taken significant time to resolve. So we had the following options:
- Release EA 0.7.2 as it was with a feature not completely finished with some, not game breaking, but annoying bugs.
- Try to get the important bugfixes and feature changes up into the EA 0.7.2 development stream. We would have needed to merge a lot of files manually, which would have costed a lot of time which could potentially result again in new bugs.
- Skip EA 0.7.2 and start stabilizing EA 0.7.3 but as a result push back the release date for you guys.
We went with the third option, as we don’t wanted to release an unfinished feature or spend a lot of valuable development time on trying to replicate an upcoming version.
That said, we are really excited about releasing EA 0.7.3 to you very very soon as the version contains really a lot of very cool things, which we think will make you happy. For example we started implementing a system to provide all members of a AI dynasty with tasks to fulfill, you will see the first signs of that system already in EA 0.7.3. And, amongst many other things, we've reworked the combat system :)
Thanks for your patience!
-Purple Lamp Development Team
Patch notes for version EA 0.7.1 – January 18th, 2019
With our last version we changed the way your family is played and how the family is extended. Our new version focuses on how to lay the foundation for your dynasty and how you are able to “Habsburg”* your competitors ;) This version contains a few things we are really happy to release to you today and get your feedback on.
(*The house of Habsburg was famous for expanding their assets and empire through clever marriages with other dynasties. Tu felix Austria nube!)
New features
- The romance system has been changed. From now on you have to start a romance with a character before you can make that character your liaison or even marry them. As soon as a romance is started you can improve the affection score between your character and your romance. Unlike before, you are now able to make advances (liaison, marriage proposal) to a romance whenever you want. Nevertheless be aware that if you do that too early that your romance won’t like that if affection isn’t high enough yet.
- As often requested we now integrated a UI that provides you with a list of potential candidates for a romance. This UI opens as soon as you click the “Embark on a romance” button. We know that some of you like to pick your potential romance candidates directly in the game world. That’s why we added a button to the UI that allows you to pick a character directly in the game world. If you don’t have a romance, you will be informed if you try to start a liaison or make a marriage proposal. Though if you have romances, you will also get the quick selection UI when making a marriage proposal or when you want to start a liaison.
- From now on your avatar, spouse and heir is able to start romances with family members of other dynasties. Your heir is now also able to marry and produce offspring. This way you are able to further strengthen your dynasty’s future.
- So now the really cool stuff is coming. If you are more the “Habsburg” kind of person you are now able to try to marry the heir of another dynasty into your family. You can do that only in a very sneaky way. You need to make the competitor’s heir fall in love with you and then do a rushed wedding (not via “Dynastic trade”). If your competitor is not disinheriting his or her heir, you will get 75% of all the money and influence, all businesses and all houses (except the main residence) when your competitor’s leader leaves the mortal world. So be very careful who your heir is hanging out with! We are really happy about that change as it allows you to take over properties of your competitors without violence.
- You probably were asking yourselves what the “influence” is we mentioned above. Well the overall way of getting titles with XP didn’t sit really well with us. That’s why with EA 0.7.1 we introduced a new “currency” called Influence. Influence can be seen as your political power. Claiming titles or executing some actions requires you to use your influence. Influence can be gained through expanding your businesses and by executing certain actions. In the future, political offices will also provide you with influence regularly. The amount of influence you currently have is shown right below the money display in the upper left corner of your HUD. We hope that you are as excited as we are about the influence concept. In the upcoming patches we will add more interesting influence driven actions to the game and will also further work on balancing.
- In order to have XP only on characters we also removed XP from unlocking dynasty skills as well. Skills can be now unlocked for your dynasty with money and influence. Additionally we changed the way the skill trees are presented. From now on it should be way more clear why skills are locked and what’s needed to unlock them.
- Another problem we wanted to solve with EA 0.7.1. are tooltips for titles, skills, items, etc. Lots of players aren’t used to the right-click + hold controls for showing more detailed tooltips. Additionally lots of level 1 tooltips (the ones shown on mouse over) were not very useful with their limited amount of information. That’s why from now on you will get a way more detailed tooltip on mouse over. The right-click + hold pattern has been removed as it’s not needed anymore. As we also wanted to make the tooltips more useful, we changed the layout and the way information is generally presented. We hope that you like it but we think tooltips are now way more useful.
- Lots of you gave feedback that you would like that your family members are not bound to the working times in businesses. We changed that. From now on your family members can work 24/7.
- The diary was removed from the game. It was not essential for the gameplay and it was also one of the main causes for the game getting quickly slower over time!
Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
Balancing
- Updated prices for titles and skills.
- Changed some of the cooldowns.
- Starting businesses start with more inventory slots.
Content
- New action “Sweet talk”: Increase your romances affection towards you by talking with them in a very very private way.
- New action “Kiss cheek”: Kiss your romance to increase affection. Beware to do that when the time is right.
- New action “Ask favor”: This action only works on liaisons. You can ask your liaison to talk well about your family. If done correctly, your reputation in your liaison’s family and their home neighborhood will rise.
- New action “Use connections”: Ask your liaison to spread good things about you with their political connections. If it works out you will be rewarded with influence.
- New action “Manipulate Liaison”: You can try to manipulate your liaison to get influence or even find some evidence.
- New action “Boast”: Boast about all your great achievements publicly. This is also a way to increase your influence.
- New action “Donate to Church”: Donate to the church to get a higher standing with the church officials and therewith get more influence.
- New action “Grease the wheels”: Bribe public servants to increase your influence.
- New action “Bribe Office Holder”: Bribe an office holder to gain political influence.
Performance and stability
EA 0.7.0 was a very big update and unfortunately some new issues were introduced that decreased stability and performance. That’s why we focused a lot on those 2 aspects in the last sprint. Everything related to stability can be found in the bug fixes section. In order to improve performance we removed the diary, changed parts of the pathfinding and rendering reflections in the water.
Bug fixes
- Implemented that a required .dll is always installed with the game in order to prevent the game from not starting up at all.
- Text files which were broken or even saved in the wrong format were leading to crashes. Therefore we implemented that if a text file is broken or in the wrong format, you will be informed with a message when the game starts.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when sending kids to school.
- Fixed a crash in the business AI.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when transferring items.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when declaring a feud via a building.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the player tried to equip too many items.
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to receive money or influence when cancelling an action.
- Fixed a bug that caused the AI to produce items despite not having the blueprints/recipes unlocked yet.
- Fixed a bug that allowed the AI to use building actions which weren’t unlocked yet.
- Fixed a bug that caused the AI of a dynasty to not appoint a new heir after the leader died.
- Fixed a bug that caused the characters in the marriage scene to be wrongly arranged.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show the CTRL icon in the loading screen.
- Fixed a bug that caused liaisons to be lost after saving and loading a game.
- Fixed a bug that caused guards not to react when you stole from them.
- Fixed a bug that allowed children to use the compliment action.
- Fixed a bug that caused gathering employees to stop working after transporters have been automated.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to give wrong feedback when equipping items which were not valid on the selected character.
- Removed the not-working propose marriage button in the dynasty UI.
- Fixed a bug that caused the recipe for the guard dog to show up twice in the skill tree.
- Fixed that the “Serf” label was shown beneath every residence building in the building menu.
- Fixed a bug that caused transporters to buy resources for items that are not even unlocked yet.
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to get stuck in the church scene when sending a character into the church but deselecting the character before entering.
Known issues
- Buildings are decaying over time, so they should be repaired from time to time. But the npc dynasties are currently ignoring the decay of their buildings so that their buildings eventually collapse.
Important information
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “Games” in the installation directory of The Guild 3.
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...
What we are planning for the next patch
The next patch will be the most brutal one so far: Combat. We will introduce a new combat system, with some new attributes, balancing and most importantly more than just 1 on 1 fights :) You will also see a slightly updated notification window, which will just be the start for a more useful notification system. Stay tuned.
A short outlook…
We are fully working on the competitor AI, the politics system and finally also now on sounds. We are really looking forward to updating the audio experience for you all.
**********
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 0.7.1: 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 patch EA 0.7.2.
Patch notes for version EA 0.7.0 – December 21st, 2018
With this patch we are directly jumping from 0.6.0 to 0.7.0 as we are introducing a major change on how you are able to play with your family. Beside that, production of goods is now limited to business buildings while you can produce special items in your residence. In order to be able to do that, we had to touch many parts in the code. We are all really excited about the version and hope that you are as well!
New features
- Here it is. From EA 0.7.0 you are now able to play with all your family members (from the age 5 on). They will show up as a portrait above your residence. The actions a character can execute depend on his/her status. There is a difference between Leader, Spouse, Heir, juvenile or adult other family members. Adults can work in your businesses like employees can. Children have a set of special children actions available which can come in handy as you will see. On the upper left we updated the quick access UI, so you are able to quick select your leader, spouse and heir. Doing actions with your characters earns them XP but of course it also makes them more vulnerable as they usually need to leave the house for that.
- With EA 0.7.0 we also changed that lots of the “basic” character actions (eg. Attack someone) are available right from the start.
- As the family became more important now with EA 0.7.0 we also fixed and reworked the family tree UI. It supports now all the different cases of marrying characters in and away. If you marry a character from another dynasty into your family you will still be able to see her origin dynasty crest. If you marry away a character you will see in which family the character was married into. Your dynasty tree mainly focuses on the “true bloodline”, which means, that if a dynasty member marries a second time (because the first spouse died) only the actual spouse is shown.
- Another big change related to the whole family system is the way you grow your family. From now on you can find the “Produce Offspring” action in the leader’s action bar. The action can only be “executed” when both spouses are in the home residence. As soon as the action is triggered both characters are blocked for a while. If you are lucky the female character will get pregnant. Pregnant characters will give birth to a child after 9 months. During that time the pregnant character has an active status effect which buffs and debuffs some attributes. In order to make that more interesting we added a new attribute to characters: Fertility. Fertility naturally decreases after a certain age but may also be modified with potions and traits in the future. But that’s not it yet. We added around 30 birth traits which are affecting the child’s attributes and derivative attributes. Base attribute points and birth traits depend on the attributes and traits of the mother and the father. Sometimes you will be lucky, sometimes your child will be an ugly no-good. We also updated the “child is born” user interface in order to reflect all the changes mentioned above.
- With EA 0.7.0 we are happy to introduce a feature that many of you long waited for: production of goods is now limited to business buildings only! We have reworked the skill tree so that you are now able to build or purchase a business building from the first skill level on. You also start with more money so that you can erect your first business directly after the game starts.
- We added a number of special items that you can only produce in your residence. These items are not for trade. We will add more of those special items in the future. If you have ideas for more special items, then please write a comment :)
- Actions are now bound to characters, which means that depending on the character type actions will be shown in the action bar or not.
- We also added that some items can only be used by adults and some only by children.
- With EA 0.7.0 you will see that characters have a bunch of new derivative attributes.
- The AI is now only using actions with their characters which they are allowed to use. Before they were using all actions available.
- Buildings are now correctly decaying over time and need to be repaired.
- We also improved the interception of characters a lot. From now on the pathfinding of characters should be way more intelligent when plotting a path to intercept another character. Additionally we added a slight speed buff to the character who is following another, so it’s easier to catch up.
- You are now able to turn VSync on and off in the options menu.
New features (under the hood)
- Designers are now able to create simple actions in the game directly in a script file and do not need to create them directly in C++ anymore.
- Designers are now able to create modifier effects in a more flexible way so it’s easier to create new status effects.
- Designers are now able to correctly define which character type is allowed to use what action without duplicating actions. This makes the creation of new actions less error prone.
- Designers are now able to define unlocks with a unified system. This makes content creation and progression balancing way easier.
- Designers are now able to create status effects that trigger result effects in certain intervals while they are active. This will allow us to create more interesting actions and effects.
- Designers are now able to define specific buildings as target filters when creating an action.
- Designers are now able to define more easily what items can be produced where.
Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
Balancing
The early experience was for a long time a thorn in our side. The ability to be able to produce the same items in the residence as in the according level 1 business, kinda made the first business not very useful. Additionally it basically lead to the gameplay of just sending your leader back and forth until the next title was achieved. We wanted to change that and now that we have a more interesting family gameplay we decided that the time is right.
- We changed the early progression entirely. You are now able to build a business building from the start.
- You are now able to produce so called “social items” in your residence. Those items boost your basic attributes. We’ll add more items in the future and we will also add actions in the future that you can trigger directly in your residence.
- Your residence starts with 6 storage slots now.
So with those changes you should be able to start your business and still be able to focus with your leader on building up a dynasty.
Content
- Your family members can now beg for money on the streets. Be aware that the few coins may hold you above water but your reputation will suffer.
- Children can now throw stones at other characters to make them dizzy. It’s not illegal to do that!
- Children can now divert guards but be aware guards don’t react friendly when they don’t like the performance.
- Children can drop a bag of fleas next to a building. The fleas are spreading to the employees and harm their productivity.
- Adults can now goad your workers. If they do it well, your workers will work faster. If not, well, they won’t like that.
- Adults can now whip your transporters. If they do it right, your transporters will be faster.
- You are now able to gather water from the well. Water can be used for wash cloth.
- Washcloth can be produced in your residence and used to clean a character. Being clean boosts your charisma.
- Flower Bouquet can be produced in your residence. Give it to another character to boost romance and reputation.
- Fixed and changed the “Find Evidence” action. Characters will now question people in the neighborhood if they saw something illegal. If yes, you will obtain an evidence you can then use to bargain or to initiate a trial.
- All scenario maps got another overhaul. Lots of bugfixes. One or more wells are now present in every district and village. Besides every well and marketplace got the name of the district or village were they are located. Groves and brushwoods got unique names.
- We removed the scenario map Birmingham as the map contains too many problems and it doesn’t offer a good experience at the moment.
Refactoring
- We entirely removed the bonsuable system (a system which had been used for all kinds of things in the game) and exchanged it with our modifier effects system. This allows us to be more flexible and we were able to solve a number of memory leaks, so that the game becomes more stable and performant in longer play sessions.
Performance
- Surplus vegetation and decorations have been reduced in all scenario maps to improve performance.
Art
- We updated the whole lighting of the game and fixed lots of bugs related to the overall rendering of the game. One of the biggest things you will recognize is that the strong grayish look has been removed by fixing the tone mapper. We also added moonlight to the game so nights got a more “bluish” tone. Generally the lighting now fully depends on the time of day.
- We added animations to male and female children.
Bug fixes
- We have hunted down a very dodged bug with the far trade markets on water which sometimes led to a crash when you came back from a trip.
- Fixed that it was possible to have multiple different outcomes per action, which lead to lots of follow up bugs.
- Fixed Give Money action to show the correct amount of money transferred.
- Fixed a bug that allowed henchmen to conquer their own buildings.
- Fixed the give gift action to work properly.
- Fixed a bug that removed all producible items from a building after it had been sold off to another dynasty.
- Fixed a bug that allowed you to buy buildings you control.
- Fixed a bug that broke animations when the game gets very slow.
- Fixed a bug that prevented modified attributes to be correctly shown in the tooltip.
- Fixed a bug that prevented transporters from getting XP when buying or selling items.
- Fixed a bug that lead calendar entries to be different to the current game time.
- Fixed a bug that caused the leader to be stuck in front of the city hall after being released from prison.
- Fixed a bug that allowed juveniles to apply for political offices.
- Fixed a bug that caused thieves to steal money from the remaining budget of a business, which lead to dead-locked business buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused the “use front store” setting to not being saved correctly when saving the game.
- Fixed a bug that caused employees to remain in another building after being fired.
- Fixed a bug that caused particles to never die.
- Fixed a bug that caused shadows to be hidden when an object is outside of the view frustum of the camera.
- Fixed a bug that caused the far distance travel action to not work on London map.
- Fixed a bug that caused tooltips to still being shown despite being outside of the game window with the mouse cursor.
- Fixed several bugs related to the price calculations of buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused ships to not being shown anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused all automated workers continually try to produce the same item while they lack the resources.
- Dozens of text corrections.
- Many missing texts added.
Important information
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “Games” in the installation directory of The Guild 3.
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...
What we are planning for the next patch
In the next patch we will release an upgraded romance system and we will finally also release bigger changes related to titles and skills. We are also working on the unification of very important tooltips and what information they contain.
A short outlook…
As already mentioned last time we are heavily working on the combat system and creating a proper dynasty AI. Beside that we are working on finalizing more scenario maps.
**********
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 0.7.0: 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 patch EA 0.7.1.
Recap and a "thank you"!
It’s been a few months now that Purple Lamp Studios took over working on The Guild 3. It has been a pretty wild ride for the new team and probably for you all as well. ;)
Getting into a very big code base, the tools and of course also the evaluation of the overall design decisions has been a tough task and it still is. As you might remember, preparing the game code so it can get up to a proper development speed and, at the same time, starting to improve controls and general user experience has been a big challenge for the new team. After that, they were able to move on to fixing bugs, performance, economy and lately the action system.
All your encouraging comments, suggestions, fan mails we receive, bug reports and your constructive feedback in the forums and surveys helped the team more than you might think. It’s incredibly motivating! Rest assured that the team doesn’t take that for granted and that they are putting lots of energy into getting updates out as regularly as possible and in the best possible shape.
We are writing this to thank you all! Thank you for your patience! Thank you for sticking with us! Thank you for all the kind words!
We value that big time!
THQ Nordic & Purple Lamp Studios
Patch notes for version EA 0.6.0 – November 30th, 2018
New features
- The feature we’ve added to the game in EA 0.6.0 was often wished for and now it’s here. There are so many role-playing elements in the game and there was no way of developing your characters but wait no more. Character levelling is in! From now on all characters are gaining experience in the game. Experience is gained by most of the actions a character is executing. For every level up you will get attribute points which you can freely distribute.
-- The level of a character is shown in the upper left on every portrait of a character.
-- The amount of experience required for the next level is shown on a progress bar in the inspection window.
-- When a character levels up the level display shows an up arrow instead of the level. As soon as all attribute points are distributed it will show the level again.
-- As a small gimmick you are now able to open the character inspection screen by just clicking on the level display.
-- The current maximum level for every character is 10. This may be changed in the future.
-- NPCs are starting with random levels but the initial level range is dependent on their status (commoner, citizen, noble).
Of course the new level system and the possibility to change your attributes (and as a result also your derivative attributes) have a big impact on the overall balancing of actions. This is the first rough iteration of the balancing. Please give us as much feedback as possible.
- We have actions in the game that actually cost money. So far you weren’t able to see that. From now on we show the price of an action directly on the action button. This way it should be easier for you to assess whether you are able to afford the action or not.
- We rearranged some of the action categories in the action bar and added a new category called “Covert Operations”. The icon for this category is still a placeholder since we are working on ideas on how we want to represent the categories.
- Lots of players didn’t know that they can access their family tree by clicking on the crest in the upper left corner. To solve that problem we added another button to the family options on the upper left. You will still be able to open the dynasty tree via the crest, but the button is the more obvious option.
- With EA 0.6.0 you are now able to instantly see whether your employees / transporters are currently in their associated building or out doing something else by just selecting the building. Characters who are out will be grayed out.
- We completely changed how actions are ordered in the action bar in the lower left. Categories and actions now have a fixed order. Additionally we show actions like “enter building”, “leave building” directly in the main bar and not in a sub-menu.
- Just a little thing, but still important: We removed that the building menu is automatically opening if a character is in a building when you select the character (eg. via a portrait). This change should prevent that a menu is popping up out of nowhere when selecting a character.
New features (under the hood)
- Designers are now able to link animations to the result definitions of activities. This way they can easily create animation feedback when actions are successful or failing.
- Designers are now able to define per action if they are valid on targets with whom the player is in a feud or in an alliance. This way they will make being in an alliance or in a feud more interesting.
- Items are now showing their effects again in the tooltip. It’s shown the same way as before but we exchanged the systems that controls how items are buffing attributes with our modifier effect system.
Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
Bug fixes
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when an elimination attempt was executed on a character without a building.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when an NPC was impeached.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when eliminating the leader of another dynasty.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when tabbing out of the game window and back in again.
- Fixed a bug that caused eliminate and other actions to stop right in the middle.
- Fixed a bug that caused city guards to stop spawning after 25 years.
- Fixed a bug that caused cheering crowds to not dissolve anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused a character to get stuck in the running animation when attacking a victim who is waiting to ambush somebody.
- Fixed a bug that caused characters to slide along while fighting if the attacked character is riding a horse or horse cart.
- Fixed a bug that kept showing an employee as selected despite already being dismissed from his or her services.
- Fixed a bug that caused important calendar appointments (court, elections) to not be shown at the time when they are happening.
- Fixed a bug that caused the find evidence action to not work properly. Now your henchmen will question NPCs in a village/city district and if successful will acquire evidence for your dynasty.
- Fixed a bug that caused building repairs to never stop once started.
- Fixed a bug that caused the repair action to be charged twice.
- Fixed a bug that caused your Avatar to unload everything automatically when entering the home building.
- Fixed a bug that caused the dynasty leader to beam to a random building after beating another dynasty leader to death. Yes, seriously...
- Fixed that the eliminate action can not be applied on characters within a building to prevent a lot of bugs that were caused by that special case.
- Fixed a bug that caused guards to not react after they having been pickpocketed.
Known issues
- We removed the poison well and kidnap action for now as there were so many unhandled edge cases that we decided to fix it properly and not hotfix it for EA 0.6.0.
Important information
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “Games” in the installation directory of The Guild 3.
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...
What we are planning for the next patch
We already teased a few features of the next patch in our previous outlook but we are also working on a few other little things. As the holiday season starts soon we thought we rather surprise you than spoiling everything in the patch notes now. :-)
A short outlook…
The next big things we are attacking are the combat system and one of the probably biggest issues, the dynasty AI.
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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 0.6.0: 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 patch EA 0.6.1.