December 21, 2018 – Patch EA 0.7.0

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:

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

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.

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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 0.7.0: https://goo.gl/forms/56uocEic6847lOmb2
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 .