Patch notes for EA 0.9.15 “Visit the rum den!” – September 2nd, 2021

Build number: 627026

Hello Guild fans,

The team had a lot to do with the groundworks for the features and the new content of patch EA 0.9.15 and for the coming patch (we will shine some light on what is planned next in the coming dev diaries). Nonetheless, we’ve achieved a lot of cool stuff that you now have the chance to play yourself. As always, we appreciate your feedback and your bug reports.

Please note: The game does not display/load save games from outdated patch versions as they have become incompatible due to the rework of core systems.

Highlights & Overview

New features: We implemented a player party formed of three of your characters, the brand new rogue profession smuggler, a rostrum where you can speak to the people in your city and implemented 16 new actions (including the actions of the smuggler).
Content & Balancing: Besides the translation of all current texts in the game, we continued to work on the AI and on balancing. Customers of service providers like the inn or the herb hut will from now on consume specific items if you have them available in your storage. Diseases have been reworked and they will occur again. And we reworked the structure, pictures and content of the ingame help to make some topics clearer for you.
Bug fixes: We have fixed more than 30 major bugs, including crash bug fixes and issues with the pathfinding, plus more than 50 minor issues.

We value your feedback!

Please support us and take the time to give reviews. Thank you very much!
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 0.9.15: Link to the survey
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.

 

New features

  • with patch EA 0.9.15, we implemented a player party consisting of up to three main characters, mandatorily including the family’s leader (your Avatar) and up to two more adult family members (left hand and right hand) of your choice. These three characters are displayed underneath the dynasty panel in the upper left corner of the HUD and you can perform more actions with them than with the rest of your family. The new player party replaces the former Avatar-spouse-heir group.
    • you can dismiss or promote the left and the right hand, but be aware that dismissed characters will be disappointed with your decision
  • new rogue profession: the Smuggler. This new profession is a hybrid of a typical rogue profession and a service provider. While on one hand your employees smuggle rum and other valuable goods, other workers try to lure citizens into your business, which officially is a rum den. People drink your rum and while you earn money through that, the main reason for serving rum is because it loosens the tongue of the revellers and there is a chance that you hear some information that makes your smuggling more profitable.
    • three new smuggling actions which target the port and/or the arsenal of the city
    • a new action to lure people into the rum den, plus the chance of getting some information for better smuggling opportunities when people have a drink in the rum den
    • the smuggler has been added as a start profession of the career game mode
  • new buildable city decoration: the Rostrum. You will be able to perform a number of actions on your rostrum, like holding speeches, playing music or giving a public banquet to lift the popularity of your dynasty.
  • customers of service providers (barber, inn, herb hut, hospital, apothecary and the new rum den) will from now on consume goods out of the building’s storage. So if your inn has some beverages and/or food on stock, you will earn more money.
    • the herb hut will no longer be able to treat leprosy and the plague, because only the hospital has the knowledge and the medicine for that
    • we added the new medicine item ‘herb bandage’ to the herb hut
    • we added the new medicine item ‘fever syrup’ to the hospital
    • we added a new action that characters with the diseases leprosy or plague can use to visit a hospital
    • especially the barber and the inn should no longer be crowded with customers directly after the game started, so the owner has more time to prepare for customers
    • please note: customers will consume specific items when they use one of the building’s services (please see the description of the service action to know which items you should hold in stock). The extra payment for the consumption is currently a fixed price.
  • there is a new action with which you can promote your businesses – your character will move in front of the building and praise it, and as long as the character is doing so, the business will get a ‘customer satisfaction’ buff if it has a front store or the workers get a ‘motivation’ buff if the business does not have a front store
  • added a new action with which you can throw a few coins into a well and pray for a bit of luck. Luck influences your chances (a tiny bit) when playing dice, on far trade trips and journeys or when starting a romance. You can also get a bit of luck when you equip a hares paw or a lucky stone
  • many of you asked for a contrary action to the ‘Greet someone’ action. Now you have the new action ‘Laugh at someone’ – it’s your own fault if you try that one out 😉
  • we added a new action that enables you to tear off pamphlets from one of your buildings that an opponent of yours has placed there
  • NPCs can sit on stools and benches and before patch EA 0.9.15 your characters weren’t able to do that as well. That has changed now, just click RMB on a bench in case you feel like resting 🙂

 

Content & Balancing

  • instead of fading out the landscape in the distance, the horizon is now hidden by thickening fog. We think that this looks much more natural and, above all, more atmospheric. Let us know what you think about it.
  • the range of actions the AI can use has been increased greatly – we will continue to enhance and balance the AI with every new update of the game
    • please note: some of our testers gave us the feedback, that the AI seems to be a bit weaker with our latest changes. If you notice the same, then please give us feedback on this. Thank you 🙂
  • all current texts in the game are fully translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese
  • we have balanced the diseases and poisons in the game and from now on diseases happen more often again – however, to not let everyone die in the blink of an eye they are still not an every-day-event.
    • there are two new events for NPCs: one can cause an accident that lowers the HP of the respective character and the other causes the (natural) poison ‘Anthony’s fire’ that needs the character heading for an apothecary to be cured
  • for AI characters, distances have more impact on finding valid targets for actions – it can still happen, but in most cases AI characters (and NPCs) should not run very very long ways if they eg want to greet someone or sit on a bench
  • with patch EA 0.9.15, we increase the possible number of children per dynasty for a bit again
  • we added a new functionality that allows our designers to set storage rules for specific items per building – especially items that are needed for the services of a building have a higher default stock limit now
  • we revised the structure of the ingame help to enhance the general readability. We reworked texts, bolded headlines and replaced and added many images in the ingame help to make the topics more understandable. Especially the production should be better explained now
  • NPCs should shop in the the front stores and marketplaces in their own village or city district more often than in the ones outside their neighborhood; this also makes your relationship with the NPCs and the customer satisfaction of your business more important if you want people to shop in your front store
  • the action to fake evidence against your opponents is now additionally sending out a message to the victim
  • more dialogues have been added
  • several action icons have been added to the game
  • the item ‘Cream cake’ can now be presented as a gift to someone else – as its description already stated

 

Bug fixes

  • fixed a bug that could lead to a crash of the game when the dynastic trade menu was opened
  • fixed a bug that would lead to a crash of the game when an AI controlled character tried to perform a post-combat action (e.g. break bones) on an already dead character
  • fixed a bug that could lead to a crash of the game when the player left a running game to the main menu
  • fixed a bug in the pathfinding that caused characters to gather in a point on a street, preventing them from walking away until the game was saved and loaded again
  • fixed an issue that caused a lot of network traffic in multiplayer games every ingame hour
  • fixed a bug that allowed players to hire family members as workers in their storage barns and warehouses
  • buildings which were already placed on the map when a new game started got their specific base effects and buffs (like productivity bonus) twice
  • fixed a bug that allowed characters to target burning or closed service providers in case they wanted to use a service the building offered
  • fixed a bug that prevented the item painkiller to cure leprosy and the item wonder cure to cure the plague; now both items have a chance to cure these diseases
  • fixed several bugs in the evaluation process of the AI for targets of actions
  • fixed a bug that would cause a change of relationship of the target character of an action to be shown above the source character
  • fixed a bug that led workers to inherit the buffs of the building they were sent to, even if that building was not their employing business – so thieves could get the buffs of the building they were breaking in. From now on, the workers always inherit the buffs of the employing building
  • fixed a bug in multiplayer where equipped items such as torches could remain on the ground after a character has died
  • fixed a bug in multiplayer where the horses of supply transporters could remain standing around at far trade markets after the transporters had finished their route
  • a sabotage action against a building that caused a damage over time – e.g. a fire – hadn’t sent a notification to the owner
  • fixed a bug where members of the players family hired in a business could not be fired when a trial was pending
  • several issues with political powers have been fixed
  • several issues in the maps have been fixed
  • the orchardist hut, preacher hut and city preacher hut lacked fire effects/particles when burning
  • fixed a bug that would allow the actions ‘ambush’ and ‘find evidence’ to take place outside of usable streets
  • fixed a bug where the dice table of an inn was still available when the business had been closed through the ‘audit the books’ action
  • loading screens and the guild logo are now resizing properly and are not being cut off anymore
  • the rostrum and the statue can now be seen and filtered by the the “Other Building” category in the area map; rostrum and the statue are now listed in the “Other owned buildings” category in the building quick access list
  • the extinguish fire animation displayed the torch and the bucket at the same time
  • a number of issues with the displayed texts of trade opportunities have been fixed
  • it was possible to enter the statue with a character
  • fixed a number of bugs with existing dialogues
  • fixed a number of issues with the multiplayer lobby
  • fixed a number of issues with models and animations
  • fixed a number of issues with localized texts

 

Known issues

  • the economical balancing of especially the windmill, the hospital, the tailor shop and the thieves hideout wasn’t finalized for this patch – we are already working on it for the next larger patch
  • many diseases do only have a minor impact on your character’s health to avoid entire families being wiped out by diseases. We will step by step tune the disease values for the next patches to avoid mass-dyings.
  • the newly localized texts might contain some errors as they still need to go through our localization QA

 

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 where you can meet us (that is, when we take a break from developing games) and other players to chat about the game.