Hello everybody!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build number: 604079

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

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

Get your name in game - follow this link!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**********

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

Hi all!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey everyone!

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

... Dialogues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Build number: 602143

Hi all!

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

Thank you in advance!

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

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

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

All the best and have fun playing!

Build number: 601665

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we are planning for the next patch
For our next patch we are planning to refine the balancing for the new separated market system, adapt all the scenario maps and potentially already deliver the first iteration for the renting of mine, quarry and lumberyard.

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

**********

We value your feedback!
If you have the time, we would appreciate it if you could fill out a short survey regarding the changes we made in patch EA 0.9.8: Google Form
Please note: we do not collect any personal information other than your feedback - you will remain completely anonymous. This survey will end the day we release the next patch.

Hi everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heinrich Meyer (Producer) & Purple Lamp Studios

Hi everyone,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guild 3 Team

Build number: 598094

Hi all!

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

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

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

All the best and have fun playing!

Build number: 596111

Hi all!

As you know we had a bit of bad luck with the launch of patch EA 0.9.7 , because some crashes and an annoying ambient sound bug slipped into the release candidate of the patch. So we worked hard and solved the following issues with this hotfix patch:

- Fixed a nasty crash that was caused when an NPC had 10 wheat bread and 10 roast beef in their inventory... in case you are wondering, this a little hint: this has something to do with Achievements :-)
- Fixed a crash that was caused by obsolete graphic adapters in the options menu. The system should now fall back on actually available adapters.
- Fixed the annoying ambient sound bug where sounds were magically teleported from one scene (or even map!) to another.
- Fixed a bug that caused employees to lose their buff when they entered a building that was neither their home building nor a public building. (PLEASE NOTE: If you continue playing with your saved game from version EA 0.9.7 then buffs of previously saved characters and buildings might still be wrong.)
- Fixed a bug where the adoption scene as well as other scenes were not fully cleaned up after a player took part or used it. That led to several bugs.

Thanks for your feedback and patience!