November 16, 2018 – Patch EA 0.5.9

New features

  • Finally! As you know feedback on what’s happening in the game world has been a big issue for us. A lot of information was either not shown at all or as a notification (lower left side in the HUD). The notification center got spammed really quickly with updates on health changes of characters, etc. Additionally the impact of the results of actions (eg. complimenting someone) were very hidden. We wanted to change that. So with the new version you get feedback directly in the game world for giving/receiving damage, applying status effects, spending/earning money, reputation changes and it also shows if a dice roll was a perfect success, success, failure or critical failure. In order to clean-up the notification system we removed notifications which are now covered by the new floating text system. We hope that action gameplay is now a lot clearer. Enjoy!
  • We implemented a new fallback system to the market. From now on base resources (eg. iron, fat, etc.) are added to the market in certain intervals if the market stock of those resources falls beneath a threshold. This way the economy should be more stable in the beginning.
  • Another economy/production system change was introduced with 0.5.9 to improve gathering businesses. With the new system, components which are used to craft higher level products will only be sold by the business if there are still enough to support the production pipeline.
  • You now have a checkbox available in the production menu to enable/disable the front store. It’s not activated by default. If you have automated transporters and the checkbox is set, items will be put in the front store as well.
  • The amount of city guards is now linked to the neighbourhood. If a city guard dies (naturally or by your mean actions) a new city guard is appointed by the city after a while and then sent to the assigned district to take on duties. It should now also be possible to change the amount of city guards per neighbourhood if you hold the correct office.
  • In preparation for features to come, we changed the way your heir is appointed. Before this change, the heir was appointed after your current leader died. This of course removes a lot of interesting aspects, like having some actions only be available to your heir or making the heir vulnerable to other dynasties. It’s also not really fitting the setting as usually the first born is automatically appointed as the heir. So what did we change? From now on your first born will be appointed as heir but that’s not all. You can also manually appoint another character of your family as heir directly in the family tree. If you do that please consider that your previous heir won’t like it and receive the “humiliated by family” status effect which affects the character’s stats. This implementation is the preparation for bigger things to come related to your family.
  • Thieves are from now on taking their chance of success and the wealth of their targets into account when deciding who they want to pickpocket.

 

New features (under the hood)

  • We have integrated support for text styling, e.g. outlines and color highlighting etc., enabling us to do more advanced text formatting.
  • Health has been integrated with the character and building attributes, adding a lot more flexibility to what actions and items can do to it.
  • We continued refactoring the error prone action system. That system is the base for most of the action and economy gameplay so we want to make that as solid as possible.
  • We continued to refactor the code to reduce compile time thus improving development speed.

 

Content

  • Boozy Breath beer has been added. Provide your competitors with a horrible breath and lower their charisma and reputation.
  • Dr. Faustus Elixir was added and increases the max health of the character who uses it.
  • You can now write a poem to impress the other gender. It’s slightly more powerful than just giving a compliment.
  • We updated most of the equippable items in the game to support the new attributes and derivative attributes.
  • We adjusted the amount of money you receive from Ambush and Pickpocket. Money amounts should now be more reasonable.

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

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a number of bugs which under certain circumstances caused the game to crash on start-up.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when a game was saved and loaded while sending a female character on a long distance travel. Yes, it is as weird as it sounds.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the find evidence action to crash.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the find evidence action was interrupted before the first valid target was identified.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the portrait to not get updated when a new item is equipped.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the face you chose in the character creation to change after the game started.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the scroll bar to not resize correctly in the production UI which prevented you from hiring additional employees.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the dagger to not disappear after the eliminate action has been used.
  • Removed the button to cancel the current action for employees which have been automated in the production window.
  • Removed the amount controller UI in the market as it is not used anymore since EA 0.5.8.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some actions to show twice in the action bar.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the eliminate action to not show any feedback when the action fails.
  • Fixed pricing for Brocade and Silk.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented guards from dying of old age.
  • Fixed a bug that allowed npcs to set a building under construction on fire.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented amounts from being shown in the grove and other gathering buildings.
  • Fixed a bug that caused thieves to always steal from the same victim.

 

Performance

  • We improved the performance when the market UI is opened a lot.
  • Health was being updates very often so that it had a big impact on performance. We fixed this and additionally reworked the functionality so it should no longer cause such a performance loss.

 

Known issues

  • Currently we are exchanging all the bonuses with our new actor value and modifier effect system. That’s why bonuses of items are not shown in EA 0.5.9. It’s already in the works and you will see item effects again in EA 0.6.0.
  • We identified an issue that causes the performance to drop if a garrison is destroyed as your employees who are outside patrolling don’t get properly removed. Firing of employees who are currently executing an action outside the building is a bigger thing which we want to solve properly. We didn’t want to delay the release of the EA 0.5.9, so the bugfix will be delivered probably with the next patch.

 

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

  • We are very excited about EA 0.6.0 because we will release character levelling with that version. So you will be able to level up your characters and upgrade their attributes.
  • We will introduce a cleaned up action bar, so it’s easier to find actions.
  • We will change when, and if, the building UIs are automatically opened when a character is selected.
  • We will also show costs on activities so you don’t get surprised anymore when going on a far distance travel.
  • We will continue to fix issues in the action system to make it less error prone.

 

A short outlook…

Soon we will completely change how you procreate, how your family tree works and how attributes are passed on to your children.

**********

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 0.5.9: https://goo.gl/forms/5UJq1zkdpna66IaA3
Please note: we do not collect any personal information other than your feedback – you will remain completely anonymous. This survey end the day we release the patch EA 0.6.0.