January 18, 2019 – Patch EA 0.7.1

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:

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

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.

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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 0.7.1: https://goo.gl/forms/HKhhizJJsiwEJbox1
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.