September 26, 2018 – Patch EA 0.5.6

New features

There were many issues related to automatic (Master AI) and manual control of your workers and transporters, so we had to rework the entire system. With the new version you can now automate every character in a building individually. You can do that by pressing the “play/stop” button right next to the character. This way it should be much easier for you to control your businesses. The storage rules of your business will be applied as soon as at least 1 employee is automated. We are currently thinking of allowing you to enable/disable the storage rules per building. What do you think?
Transporters will be automated by default. You can just stop it by pressing the “stop” button.
You can now automate your Avatar just like an employee.
With the new version we also reworked the way you switch from automatic control to manual control. There were a lot of issues related to this topic before, so we had to change it entirely. In EA 0.5.6 you are finally able to stop automation of a worker/transporter by assigning a product to produce or by assigning a trade route. The user interface will instantly show that the character is now following manual orders. Automation is also stopped when you start moving your characters manually. To sum things up, you should now be able to much more accurately control your production pipeline.
With the new automation system we also tackled a common problem where it was not possible to assign individual item amounts to your workers. This was reworked and you are now able to assign each individual worker a custom amount of items to produce. A worker will then produce/collect the assigned item until the previously assigned amount was reached. This will give you an even more fine-grained control over your workers and the amount of items they produce.
With the new version we also made changes to how “good” the AI is at optimizing automation. The AI used to instantly update item prices in the market. This way it was never possible to play better than the AI controlled businesses, making the production gameplay slightly redundant, which obviously doesn’t make sense. We changed it so the AI is checking less regularly, so don’t be surprised if they don’t instantly adapt their production pipeline.
With EA 0.5.6 we also improved the feedback when you try to place buildings on the map. It was previously really hard to identify why a building could or could not be placed on certain locations on the map. From now on, as soon as you select the building in the construction menu, a plane with an outline is shown beneath the building that you are trying to place as well as beneath all buildings already on the map. You additionally get a tooltip right next to your cursor to explain why a building can’t be placed there. We also fixed a lot of issues related to the construction validation code (more in the bugs section of the patch notes).
We also changed the way pickpocketing works. The stolen amount was not actually subtracted from your victims, instead the money was just generated out of thin air – therefore you weren’t able to use stealing to harm your opponents. From now on you will deduct the actual amount from your competitors.
We also added that the compliment scene is only shown if you are complimenting someone and not if you are being complimented. This way you should have fewer interruptions whenever your character gets a compliment.
We have implemented rotation and zooming of the character inside the inspection window.

New features (under the hood)

You will benefit from the following features in patches to come, because they allow us to implement actions, artefacts and so on more efficiently.

We have now enabled designers to be able to trigger notifications via the activity system. This should improve feedback and awareness.
We changed the UI system to support UTF16 strings which is the ground works for special characters of different languages.
We went over all uninitialized variables which we found in the code and are now properly initializing them. This should get rid of weird things like you encountered in previous patches (yellow/purple graphics glitch, broken building upgrades).

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

You had to use the sabotage action twice to have an effect on a building. We fixed that.
Instead of the citizen title tooltip the resident title tooltip was shown in the skill tree window. That’s fixed now.
Employees that have been caught pickpocketing were starting to pickpocket themselves afterwards. That shouldn’t happen anymore.
Fixed a crash which happened when the AI Master tried to hire guards after their building was destroyed.
You weren’t able to assign work to employees outside of their building. That’s fixed with the new system.
Transporters are now selling fewer raw materials, so not being able to produce goods of higher value should happen less often.
We fixed several issues related to the building placement validation checks. The validation checks should now work more consistently.
Locked building addon icons weren’t shown anymore which was fixed in EA 0.5.6.
A crash was fixed which was caused by aborting a sabotage action after the target had already been burned down.
Sometimes characters were created without a portrait and without their respective dynasty colors.
Audience of a fighting scene were not moving back to their original positions after a fight ended.
Hiring workers reduced the set budget for automation. From now on it will only have an effect on the remaining budget.
The brushwood is shown correctly again.
Cats aren’t white anymore in the higher LOD levels.
A wider range of special characters in texts should now be shown correctly.
We fixed that after loading a saved game some AI functionalities were not called correctly again and therefore wouldn’t be executed anymore.

Performance

We did another round of performance profiling and identified a few bigger issues which will be fixed in the next version.

Art

All buildings should have new icons now which fit better to the building menu and new HUD.
We added cloud shadows that are moving over the map so it makes the world feel more alive. Currently we are still tweaking the intensity of those shadows so the appearance may change in the upcoming patches.
The sun is now moving again, so the shadows of objects wants to shift with the day and night cycles, thus adding to the atmosphere in the world. There is a known issue that the shadows flicker on some graphics cards. We want to work on that along with making the shadows look more natural in a future patch.

Known issues

The first time you confirm the name of a building you want to construct the game is stuck for a very short time. After that first loading of building boundary boxes it should work fine.
Automation: When an automated character’s current action is interrupted it happens that the automation and the current action are stopped. We know that this occurs with the compliment action for the main character as well as with attack actions for other characters. We are on it and work on improving these situations.
Automation: When your main character is automated their selection circle might flicker between golden and blue.
Automation: In gathering businesses the AI tends to prefer producing and selling raw materials a lot. We are working on balancing this out.

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 will focus on improving the text rendering as it’s impact on the performance is way to big.
We will further focus on fixing the underlying action system which still leads to stuck characters after they have been interrupted.
We will additionally work on how to transfer items and fix the broken drag and drop system.
As already mentioned we will also work on improving and fixing existing character actions.
With the upcoming version, fires and diseases will start to spread.

A short outlook…

In the upcoming versions we will focus on the secondary attributes of characters and how they will affect character activities.

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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 0.5.6: https://goo.gl/forms/2pckLuAvRXTAcGcr1
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 0.5.7 .