July 2nd, 2019 – Patch EA 0.9.0

Hi all! Today, we are probably releasing the biggest update, since we took over development of the Guild 3. Before we can jump into the patch notes, we wanted to drop a few words regarding Multiplayer. We received lots of comments, that we should focus on single player instead of multiplayer. We understand that from a player’s point of view. Nevertheless for development reasons we had to make the choice to also work on multiplayer now, because integrating MP at the end of development would have been very complex and very likely error-prone. Anyways as you will see with this patch, we are of course focusing on both modes. So what’s added in EA 0.9.0? Well, check-out the patch notes below. We hope you enjoy everything we added!

NOTE: The multiplayer mode is NOT implemented in the normal version. If you want to test the multiplayer, you need to unlock the corresponding BETA version for your game.

STEAM:
1) Open your games library and right-click on “The Guild 3”.
2) Click on “Properties” and in the following menu on the tab “BETAS”.
3) Enter the code “multiplayerbeta” and then click on “CHECK CODE”.
4) Now choose “mp-beta” in the beta dropdown above the input field.
You can switch between the normal game and the mp-beta if you choose the appropriate version in the beta dropdown. It then takes a moment for the necessary data to be downloaded before you can play.

GOG:
1) Open your games library and right-click on “The Guild 3”.
2) Click on “Settings”.
3) In the following menu switch on the “BETA CHANNELS” far right in the “CONFIGURE GAME” section, so that the channel dropdown appears in the same section.
4) Select “Add private channels” in the channel dropdown.
5) In the following window enter the code “multiplayerbeta” and confirm to make the MP-BETA available.
You can switch between the normal game and the MP-BETA if you choose the appropriate version in the channel dropdown in this window. It then takes a moment for the necessary data to be downloaded before you can play.

We will remove this BETA version as soon as we have firmly integrated the multiplayer mode into the game.
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 these information as well in the FAQs Beta Multiplayer!

New features

One very often requested feature has now been implemented – The new storage keeper. The UI was entirely reworked. You can now define for every item, how many you want to keep in your storage, how many items should be sold via the front store and you can also modify the sale price in the front store per item. Items are pre-filtered fitting to the business. You can change those filters so you have absolute control. You can also set per item if they should be sold at all.
With the new storage rules we are also releasing in EA 0.9.0 the long awaited rework of manual trade routes! Setting up trade routes is now way less complex but also less error prone. To assign an automatic or manual trade route, just click on the wheel icon right next to a transporter. It will open a new UI, in which you can assign existing (saved per building) trade routes, or set up a new one. You can also assign the automatic route to the transporter. From now on you can select more waypoints, you can define the maximum amount of items per slot. Upon finishing a trade route, the transporter will send you a notification if there had been issues on that trade route (if he/she wasn’t able to at least fulfill one transaction).
In order to make routes more fail-safe, transporters will from now on not instantly leave, just because they weren’t able to buy all items yet. They will have a wait time and will do another check for item availability before they are leaving. Transporters will now also regularly check if they can upgrade the amount of carrying slots.
Transporters that are adhering to the storage rules (= on auto) will now realize properly that they don’t need budget for getting items from businesses/warehouses the player controls.
We finally reworked the economy in the game. The citizens have needs now which they try to fulfill. The needs of the citizens depends on their social caste, the amount of citizens in a caste, product groups, season and weather. Every month (= 12 times per round) those needs are evaluated and adapted. Of course prices of resources and products are updated accordingly.
While reworking the economy we also fixed and properly implemented front stores. Citizens will now again also come to your businesses front stores to fulfill their needs. Be aware that there are some factors (eg. price, reputation within the village/district, customer satisfaction of the business, etc.) that have an impact on whether they are attracted by your front stores or not.
One other big thing that wasn’t working properly were the far-trade markets. You weren’t able to sell items because of the UI, you weren’t able to trade with far-trade markets which are placed in water, you weren’t able to select far-trade markets on the area map or in trade routes. So lots of things to solve. Therefore we made bigger changes to the system. From now on you can select far-trade markets via the area map and via trade routes. One thing we also changed is, that when you enter a far-trade market, a market UI shows up, so you are able to buy and sell goods. Additionally sea far-trade markets can now be accessed at the ports of a city.
Often requested, now it’s in: The tutorial. You can now start a tutorial by selecting the new scenario map: Humble Beginnings. The tutorial will guide you through the core concepts of the game. When not playing the tutorial, you are, from now on, still able to get more information on the core concepts of the game. A new help menu was added (can be found on the right side of the HUD), which contains several game play chapters. Additionally, the most complex windows in the game now display a question mark icon in the header. Clicking on that icon will give you more details on how that window works.
In EA 0.9.0 we also reworked the guilds in the game. You will now properly be invited but your dynasty will also be kicked out of the guild again if your reputation and attitude are not matching with the guild anymore. Joining a guild will grant your dynasty now buffs or even actions. We also changed the guild window to be properly usable.
In order to be able to chat to other players, we now added a chat window to multiplayer games.
The erect building window was also updated to provide you with better information why a building is locked, or why it can’t be afforded. We also added now proper tooltips to locked items in the production UI. So from now on you should know why you can’t produce an item yet or why an action is still locked.
We also added a few smaller but, in our opinion, useful features to the game to make your life a bit easier. From now on whenever you can’t afford an action a pop-up will inform you about that. Also you are now able to destroy items directly in a character’s inventory. As the feedback for the new pausing was not very good, we added a new “Slow-Mo” game speed to the game as a first step to tackle the issue.

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

With EA 0.9.0 we changed who can inherit a family’s legacy. Before our changes also the spouse (who didn’t belong to the family’s bloodline) was able to become leader of the dynasty. Also children were able to be leader. This made it very hard to wipe out a family and it also created lots of bugs related to the family tree window. That’s why we changed that now. From now on only true-blood and adult family members can become leader.
The black widow poison can only be applied on characters which are not in a building, so it’s less powerful.
Adjusted thresholds for when the AI decides to spend money on certain things.
Adjusted thresholds for when AI Master allows transporter to spend money on inventory items.
Transporter can now buy any inventory item from the market to enhance their capacity.
Transporters will not start a new route during rest times, once they come back to their home building, they will rest until the work day starts again.
As requested we changed the starting age of the first avatar to 18 years. Therefore we slightly reduced life expectancy.
It is now possible that your characters could return with an illegitimate child from their long distance journey.
We adjusted the number of businesses a dynasty can own and also adjusted the number of employees those buildings can hire.

Art

Several corrections in LOD’s of different objects.
Bounding boxes for several props have been added.
The far trade markets via land in the rest of the scenario maps have been reworked so that they look more like real markets.
Brand new building: storage barn.
Optimizations and bug fixes on several scenario maps.

Content

We reworked production chains and adjusted the skill trees a bit. We added a few more products to make the production chain a bit more complex and increase dependency on other skill trees. We also adjusted the base prices of products so that you won’t be able to afford the most high level items right from the start of the game. Adjustment of the prices of skills, buildings and nobility titles will follow in a future update.
The storage barn – the warehouse for the villages – is now available once you gain the title of “Resident”.

Performance and stability

Fixed a bug that caused the game to have performance drops in certain intervals.
We changed the way the game is loaded up. Before the window often got unresponsive, which lead players to believe that the game crashed. Also the logo movies were stuttering horribly when being played. Loading up the game should now work properly.

Bug fixes

Fixed a bug that caused the game to not allow more than 8 add-ons per building, even though the building should have had 16 to 24 addo-on slots available.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash upon selecting a destroyed building via the area map.
Fixed several crash bugs related to very specific cases in post-combat action handling.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to not allow players to move to far trade markets via the area map or building list.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if the building window was open while the building was destroyed in the background.
Fixed a bug that prevented players from selecting a market by clicking on any of the tents. And we fixed, that from now on all elements of the castle are clickable.
Fixed lots of bugs related to moving the whole family from one residence to another residence.
Fixed a bug that caused the head of the family to stop the currently assigned actions upon placing a building.
Fixed the localization text for the stand guard actions so it’s properly representing what the action is doing in the game.
Fixed a bug that caused characters to not enter a building via the enter building action if they are too far away.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show the “Not enough money” window upon trying to purchase a building.
Fixed a bug that made wooden fences undestroyable.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to allow players to place a building on a position where another building has already been placed.
Fixed the unlock order of some of the items.
Fixed a bug that allowed children to throw rocks at characters within a building.
Fixed a bug that prevented the new owner of a building (traded) to fire or automate employees.
Fixed a bug that caused city gates to be targetable objects.
Fixed a bug that caused the collision-box for far-trade markets to not have the proper size.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to still show calendar entries for characters that have already died.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to show calendar entries twice if the player has more than one family member in an office group.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash if the family member list became too long.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to not create all AI dynasties when the match starts.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to allow multiple pregnancies for one character simultaneously.
Fixed a bug that was showing buy and sell price of an item from the market point of view. Now buy/sell price label are inverted and represent the player’s point of view.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to always choose the leader of a family to be the one that passes a verdict, despite another family member was the office holder.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to allow characters to apply for an office position despite the office not yet being open for applications.
Fixed a bug that caused transporters to sell items needed for production.
Fixed a bug that allowed children to execute grown-up tasks.
Fixed a bug that caused characters that are gathering resources to gather more than the specified amount.
Fixed lots of bugs related to transporter stack sizes not fitting trade route specifications.
Fixed lots of localization bugs.
We removed some of the options in the options menu as they were not working or weren’t supposed to be even available.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to show the item tooltip of an item currently being dragged.

Multiplayer – Bug fixes

Fixed a bug that caused the game to only show combat texts for characters you control in multiplayer games.
Fixed a bug that caused the client to crash upon being kicked by the host.
Fixed a bug that caused the game to show 2 different windows on top of each other upon being kicked out of a session.
Potentially fixed a bug that caused clients to experience very weird graphical glitches in multiplayer games.
Fixed a bug that caused dogs to not be properly synced in multiplayer games.
Fixed a bug that caused the lobby screen to always show the version number of the first lobby in red.
Lots of net objects (eg. Actions, Effects, Events) are now properly removed in multiplayer games which should make MP sessions more stable.

Known issues

The game may crash in multiplayer upon returning from the lobby screen to the main menu. We are working on that and will deliver a fix with the next version.
It may happen that a tooltip remains for a very short time after you already stopped hovering an action. Should be fixed in the next version.

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

Join our official Discord server https://discord.gg/CGnN2Vb) 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 the next patch we are planning to implement a new behavior in order to drastically reduce the amount of court scenes. We also are planning to rework how the healing businesses work. Expect to have some diseases in the next patch. On the multiplayer front we will focus on host migration and the possibility to load and join saved multiplayer games.

A short outlook…

Our focus will be on adding some more interesting actions for kids and also some early unlocked diplomacy actions, so interaction with other dynasties gets more interesting from the start.

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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 0.9.0: https://forms.gle/aiTZ9c4Wux2fPaUj9
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.