Patch notes for EA 0.9.11 “Hear! Hear! A monopoly is near!” – October 7th, 2020

Build number: 608190

Hello everyone!
It has been a while, but we think it was worth the wait. EA 0.9.11 is probably one of the most impactful patches of The Guild 3 so far. Honestly, we are also a bit nervous and excited because we changed something that you all have been using probably the most when playing – the production system. Goal of this massive change was to streamline production and also significantly improve the associated user interfaces. But that’s not all of it, we also introduced the renting of resource producer-feature and the beloved town crier. On top of all that, we added some smaller features, fixed lots of bugs and made some decent progress on the AI.
We are really looking forward to your feedback especially for the new production system and the renting of resource producers! It would greatly help us if you would fill out the survey mentioned at the end of this patch notes. Enjoy and let us know what you think!

New features

  • We introduced a new production system along with a completely overhauled UI for all buildings in the game. The new system’s core is the so-called “Order list”. Instead of assigning items individually to every worker, you define an order of items you want to have produced. Your diligent workers will distribute the work between them and try to fulfill the order list. Another big convenience improvement is that your workers will automatically produce the intermediate items, needed for your items in the order list. This way you can fully focus on what you want to produce instead of all the different items that are needed as ingredients. In service oriented buildings you are of course able to define how many of your employees should focus on serving customers.
  • You can freely change the order of the items in the order list. If you want to produce a certain set of items several times, you can loop that list until you decide to change or stop it. You can also set the production to automatic. This way, you should have complete freedom on how strongly you want to micromanage your businesses.
  • In order to be able to introduce this new way of producing items, we also completely reworked all the building user interfaces. As you will see, most of the different menu options can be found in the top bar of the building UI. Some of the actions that were located in the building UI moved down to the action bar, so you can access them without even opening the building UI. For quality of life we introduced a bunch of filters for showing the respective characters in your building, so it’s easier for you to see who’s in the building and what they are up to.
  • One thing that in our opinion was missing already for a very long time was a feature to actually see the stats of a building. You were able to upgrade them but you never saw actually what’s the impact. So you are now able to open (similar to the character info window) a building info window, which lists all the relevant attributes.
  • Businesses need to be fed with resources. So it’s time to control the base of the economy and get a grip on those resource producers. With EA 0.9.11, you are now able to bid over the control of the mine, quarry and lumberyard. If you come out first, you will have control over staffing, production and storage rules, for a limited period of time.
  • Another feature we added in EA 0.9.11 is something that was requested often by you, the players. We are talking about selling a building. Up until now you were only able to either destroy a building or sell it via a trade to another dynasty. Well, from now on you will be able to decommission a building. Upon decommissioning your building it will be destroyed and you will get some of the value of the building back. So if you are in need of some coin, reducing your operations is now an option.
  • It’s all about history. With this patch we introduce the town crier back to the game. The town crier will walk the streets and announce historical events that happened during the year you are currently playing in.
  • We started to add a new AI archetype system. Archetypes are defined by a certain basic behavior that influences the way the AI decides how to act. When a new game starts the AI is selecting an archetype randomly and will therefore behave differently even when having the same profession. The archetype system will grow and be improved with the next versions.
  • We significantly improved the fading behavior so it better detects when the camera is close to a building. It is much more accurate now and will no longer fade out from too far away.
  • With EA 0.9.11, you will have the first bunch of Early Access names in the game! You remember our call for sending us your name or the name of a loved one, so that you will see that name in the game? That’s the first iteration of that feature! Go to the options menu and enable ‘EA Names’.

 

Content & Balancing

  • We improved the decision making process of the AI when constructing buildings. They will now also construct residences and businesses outside of their home neighborhoods. Additionally, we also improved a lot the way the AI is building warehouses. Now, they should be a lot smarter when choosing a location for any building. These changes also fixed that AI dynasties were losing just after 2 rounds in the career mode. They were building warehouses like crazy…
  • Another improvement we made for the AI is the way the AI is handling objectives that timed out. Up until now they were often replaced by the same objective. From now on, those objectives are put on a black-list for a certain period of time. Additionally, the AI is now able to follow certain steps to accomplish set objectives.
  • We extended the end liaison action to also allow you to end romances. This way you can end all means of love with a single button.

 

Bug fixes

  • Fixed several bugs related to cutscenes.
  • Fixed a bug that caused connection issues particularly when migrating a multiplayer session to another host.
  • Fixed a bug that caused non-looping animations to not properly play after loading a save game or when the animation was played outside of the camera frustum.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to prevent players from joining a multiplayer game that has been started without any players except the host.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to show “dead” multiplayer lobbies in the multiplayer game list.
  • Fixed a bug/behavior that caused the game to allow transporters to work at night.
  • Fixed lots of bugs that caused a multiplayer game session to run out of sync.
  • Fixed a bug that caused female characters to get pregnant even when being dead, banished, kidnapped, jailed or on a far-trade.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to discontinue the dirty work of thieves after being unconscious as long as the avatar was in a scene.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show kidnapped characters in the inventory when being at a marketplace.
  • Fixed a bug that allowed robbers to break into buildings under constructions.
  • Fixed a horrible bug that caused sick workers to never seek treatment and eventually die of any sickness – often after having infected all of their colleagues.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to still count votes from judges who died before the final verdict was given.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the game to prevent players to zoom with the mouse wheel while the cursor was on top of a speech bubble.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the AI to promote and vote for laws that are not beneficial for their families.

 

Important information

The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.
If you are experiencing difficulties with loading and saving the game, you may attempt to delete all files from the folder “%userprofile%\Saved Games\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\Saved Games\Guild3).
Multiplayer: 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 this information as well in the FAQs Multiplayer on our webpage!
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 might 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

If you still have issues afterwards, then we recommend to uninstall the game and then manually delete the folder “%localappdata%\Guild3” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3). Then re-install the game.
Crash dumps for bug reports can be found in “%localappdata%\Guild3\sentry\reports” (C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Local\Guild3\sentry\reports) per default.
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

The next patch will finally unleash all the new business buildings, which means new products and animations. Also a number of new actions and dialogues and a great deal of AI improvements, plus overall balancing will come along.

A short outlook…

As mentioned already we’ll now double down on the AI and overall balancing.

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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 0.9.11: https://forms.gle/xCHLpbDJPrVA8XkE7
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.