November 30, 2018 – Patch EA 0.6.0

New features

  • The feature we’ve added to the game in EA 0.6.0 was often wished for and now it’s here. There are so many role-playing elements in the game and there was no way of developing your characters but wait no more. Character levelling is in! From now on all characters are gaining experience in the game. Experience is gained by most of the actions a character is executing. For every level up you will get attribute points which you can freely distribute.
    • The level of a character is shown in the upper left on every portrait of a character.
    • The amount of experience required for the next level is shown on a progress bar in the inspection window.
    • When a character levels up the level display shows an up arrow instead of the level. As soon as all attribute points are distributed it will show the level again.
    • As a small gimmick you are now able to open the character inspection screen by just clicking on the level display.
    • The current maximum level for every character is 10. This may be changed in the future.
    • NPCs are starting with random levels but the initial level range is dependent on their status (commoner, citizen, noble).

    Of course the new level system and the possibility to change your attributes (and as a result also your derivative attributes) have a big impact on the overall balancing of actions. This is the first rough iteration of the balancing. Please give us as much feedback as possible.

  • We have actions in the game that actually cost money. So far you weren’t able to see that. From now on we show the price of an action directly on the action button. This way it should be easier for you to assess whether you are able to afford the action or not.
  • We rearranged some of the action categories in the action bar and added a new category called “Covert Operations”. The icon for this category is still a placeholder since we are working on ideas on how we want to represent the categories.
  • Lots of players didn’t know that they can access their family tree by clicking on the crest in the upper left corner. To solve that problem we added another button to the family options on the upper left. You will still be able to open the dynasty tree via the crest, but the button is the more obvious option.
  • With EA 0.6.0 you are now able to instantly see whether your employees / transporters are currently in their associated building or out doing something else by just selecting the building. Characters who are out will be grayed out.
  • We completely changed how actions are ordered in the action bar in the lower left. Categories and actions now have a fixed order. Additionally we show actions like “enter building”, “leave building” directly in the main bar and not in a sub-menu.
  • Just a little thing, but still important: We removed that the building menu is automatically opening if a character is in a building when you select the character (eg. via a portrait). This change should prevent that a menu is popping up out of nowhere when selecting a character.

 

New features (under the hood)

  • Designers are now able to link animations to the result definitions of activities. This way they can easily create animation feedback when actions are successful or failing.
  • Designers are now able to define per action if they are valid on targets with whom the player is in a feud or in an alliance. This way they will make being in an alliance or in a feud more interesting.
  • Items are now showing their effects again in the tooltip. It’s shown the same way as before but we exchanged the systems that controls how items are buffing attributes with our modifier effect system.

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.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when an elimination attempt was executed on a character without a building.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when an NPC was impeached.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when eliminating the leader of another dynasty.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when tabbing out of the game window and back in again.
  • Fixed a bug that caused eliminate and other actions to stop right in the middle.
  • Fixed a bug that caused city guards to stop spawning after 25 years.
  • Fixed a bug that caused cheering crowds to not dissolve anymore.
  • Fixed a bug that caused a character to get stuck in the running animation when attacking a victim who is waiting to ambush somebody.
  • Fixed a bug that caused characters to slide along while fighting if the attacked character is riding a horse or horse cart.
  • Fixed a bug that kept showing an employee as selected despite already being dismissed from his or her services.
  • Fixed a bug that caused important calendar appointments (court, elections) to not be shown at the time when they are happening.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the find evidence action to not work properly. Now your henchmen will question NPCs in a village/city district and if successful will acquire evidence for your dynasty.
  • Fixed a bug that caused building repairs to never stop once started.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the repair action to be charged twice.
  • Fixed a bug that caused your Avatar to unload everything automatically when entering the home building.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the dynasty leader to beam to a random building after beating another dynasty leader to death. Yes, seriously…
  • Fixed that the eliminate action can not be applied on characters within a building to prevent a lot of bugs that were caused by that special case.
  • Fixed a bug that caused guards to not react after they having been pickpocketed.

 

Known issues

  • We removed the poison well and kidnap action for now as there were so many unhandled edge cases that we decided to fix it properly and not hotfix it for EA 0.6.0.

 

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 already teased a few features of the next patch in our previous outlook but we are also working on a few other little things. As the holiday season starts soon we thought we rather surprise you than spoiling everything in the patch notes now. 🙂

A short outlook…

The next big things we are attacking are the combat system and one of the probably biggest issues, the dynasty AI.

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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 0.6.0: https://goo.gl/forms/00mZwpdZQlf66bNH2
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 0.6.1.