April 5th, 2019 – Patch EA 0.7.5

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Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.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:

STEAM -> right-click on “The Guild 3” in your Steam library, then Properties – LOCAL FILES – VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES…
GOG -> right-click on “The Guild 3” in your library, then Properties – “More” – Manage Installation – VERIFY/REPAIR

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.

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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 0.7.5: https://forms.gle/TdepJZ96rbxkt8uLA
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.