Developer Diary #7, March 2020

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