October 17, 2018 – Patch EA 0.5.7

New features

  • Fires and diseases now have the ability to spread through the city. So be careful when you try to sabotage your competitor’s buildings, you might burn down the whole town. The put out fire action can now also be used on buildings you don’t control. This way you can secretly start a fire in a competitor’s building and then help putting it out to boost your reputation.
  • When one of your dynasty members or employees enters a neutral building or the building of another dynasty their portrait will now be shown at that building as well. This should help you to locate characters that are currently in buildings not owned by you.
  • We reworked the way you move items from one inventory to another so we can unify the system used. First we implemented drag and drop, so from now on you can drag an item from one slot to another. Before you weren’t able to release the item anymore and the icon was stuck on your cursor. Everybody who liked the click and drop don’t worry, you can still do that as well. From now on as soon as you move an item to another slot a pop-up shows up in which you have full control and detailed feedback. In the pop-up you can control the amount you want to transfer either via the slider, your mousewheel, the min and max buttons or even by directly typing the amount in the number input field. If you are buying or selling something you will see the actual costs/yields and what you will spend or earn. You can confirm a transaction by clicking the confirm button or by just hitting the ENTER key.
    We are really looking forward to your feedback on this particular change. Everyone who has been with the Guild 3 from the beginning may need some time to get used to the new system but we think it’s the best and fastest way to transferring items. Please provide us with as much feedback as possible on that topic. Thanks!
  • You will now be able to easily transfer items between characters that are in the same building through the building menu. Items can be dragged from one character to another, from inventory to Equipment slot and so on, try it out! The highlighting of valid slots is not working properly yet, this will be fixed in a later update.
  • Market prices don’t update instantly anymore when you buy or sell an item in the market. The market now checks stock of different product types in different intervals and updates the prices. This should make it more interesting to earn money just by trading since you can’t exploit the instant changes anymore.
  • Actions that affect the relationship to other dynasties or villages/districts can now fail and have a negative impact.
  • A lot of you requested that we add more information to the panel that shows your dynasty leader in the top left corner. So we added the avatar’s health and currently executed action to the panel. This should give you a better overview of what your avatar is currently doing.
  • Guilds are making their way to the Guild! We renamed the societies to guilds since we believe it fits the theme of the game a lot better. Right now their functionality is still the same but we also plan to rework some of them in future updates.
  • Employees you hire are now added instantly to your building. This fixes a lot of bugs related to the artificial delay. Since we thought the delay didn’t have a big gameplay value we removed it in order to make gameplay smoother.
  • We made some adjustments to how the production automation decides what to build next.. It should now also work properly for gathering businesses.
  • We have implemented some new jingle sounds. We will add many more sound effects later.

 

New features (under the hood)

  • We improved how NPCs execute, end, and repeat actions. This is a first step towards our rework of how we handle actions and should already fix a number of bugs connected to failing actions.
  • We also improved how characters behave once they reached the point where they want to execute an action that has been assigned to them. The old way used to get stuck more often. It’s not perfect yet but it is already less error prone than before.
  • Also, during our actions rework we refactored how characters wait on other characters to know when they are supposed to execute their action.
  • We refactored how buildings handle attributes like health or productivity so our designers can use our new systems to affect buildings as well as characters.
  • We added a “disabled” state for buttons so that buttons that are disabled don’t get replaced by images or disappear anymore.

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 which prevented characters from triggering the working animation while they are working in a building. So from now on you should see characters working around their buildings.
  • Buildings can now only be built in the neighborhoods they are supposed to be built in. (see icons for City and Village in the construct building menu).
  • Fixed a bug where the game would crash when you try to eliminate a character that is lying in ambush.
  • The game should no longer crash when you try to click on the “more info” button for court hearing entries in your calendar.
  • Fixed an exploit where it was possible to hire an infinite amount of workers when the game was paused.
  • Fixed the blue bar in the professions tooltip in the character creation screen.
  • Characters that use the compliment action should now get stuck less frequently.
  • Fixed an issue where text would overflow the text boxes.
  • When trying to place a building there should no longer be a lag when the game calculates the placement markers.
  • Fixed a lot of instances where characters were walking on the spot.
  • The bars indicating the relationship to dynasties in the 3D World should now show the same value as the bars in the book of dynasties.
  • Fixed several bugs connected to the new automation system.
  • There should now be enough resources in the market at the beginning of a game.
  • Fixed a bug where Ambushing would create an insane amount of money when executed on neutral citizens.
  • Rogues beware! City Guards are back on patrol and will interfere with your shady business.
  • Fixed that the smoke of burnt down buildings loops forever. We also changed the particle effect to be less prominent.

 

Performance

  • We improved the way texts are rendered in the game. The old system slowed down the game a lot. We will now be able to add more text feedback for the game in later iterations.
  • We also improved how the resizing of text labels is handled. This should also give us some more performance boosts.
  • We have improved the way how and how often paths are calculated, therefore one of the reasons why the game gets slower over time (more characters running around) is gone. This change also removes the “micro freezes” which happened regularly.

 

Art

  • Adjusted some building icons in the build menu
  • Fixed texture bugs on some character models

 

Known issues

  • Rogue skill tree actions like pickpocketing, break into building, intervene etc. are still subject of rework and function only partially.
  • Characters in the production buildings are now animated. Some animations are still wrong (smith in the herb hut) or might lose their tools (hammer, broom) after a saving/loading a game.

 

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 want to add secondary attributes to the character inspection window and we also want to give you more information on status effects in the game.
  • We will add a new detection system to the game which makes the whole observation and identification of legal and illegal actions more interesting.
  • The placement of buildings right now still feels a bit clunky, we want to address this issue.

 

A short outlook…

As we are almost done with the activity system rework we will now focus our efforts on more gameplay relevant topics. One part of that will be around family and romance.

**********

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 0.5.7: https://goo.gl/forms/PoRwPRRXnirHspnK2
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 0.5.8 .