Patch Notes for Version EA 0.5.2 - July 4, 2018


New features
- Titles can no longer be unlocked purely with XP, but the player must also be able to afford the gold price of the title. This means that with version 0.5.2 costs are incurred if you have met the XP requirements for a title and would like to obtain it. The current costs are to be seen as a first iteration of balancing title costs. We appreciate feedback.
- Previously, it was difficult to distinguish Dynasty characters from traditional NPCs. The result was that you constantly had to mouse over characters to find out whether a character is a dynastic character or not. To improve this situation, we have incorporated a feature that colors certain parts of the characters' garments - the color corresponds to the dynasty's coat of arms. As part of the changes, we have removed the ability to manually change the color of clothing. Please note that we have of course tried to use large, prominent areas. For some armor we decided not to color it.
- The same problem also affected buildings in the game. It was not clear which dynasty owned which building. Here, too, players had to click on the building or move their mouse over it to get the relevant information. For this reason, we have now introduced flags on the buildings, which show the coat of arms of the dynasty in possession of the building. To get a bit of variation, the number and location of flags displayed on buildings is randomized. With this feature, it should now be easier for you to distinguish important from less important buildings.
- As the variation of the character life expectancy was not strong enough, we've changed the system that calculates character life spans. The natural life expectancy of dynasty members is now between 55 and 89 years and that of ordinary people between 40 and 89 years.
- Employees and transporters all looked very similar and the building they worked in did not affect their visual appearance. With the new patch the look of employees depends on their profession. Right now we are mainly using already existing character models. In the future, we will expand the visual diversity of the characters in professions even more so that it will be easier to distinguish them on the street.
- In 0.5.2 we are also introducing that employees can only work in other businesses of the same profession. Although employees can still be sent to their own non-resident businesses, they no longer appear as employees. If you run your business automatically, then the AI also uses employees who are currently in another building.

Bug fixes
- The AI now produces different products, depending on market prices. This fix has a big impact on how markets are filled and frequented.
- If you destroy a building while it is being upgraded, the scaffolding will now be properly removed.
- If you upgrade a building to the next building level, then the outline is drawn correctly around the whole building.
- The outline is now displayed correctly around the scaffolding and the conquest flag of a building.
- The building level is now displayed correctly in the building menu.
- If you spy on a building you can see all the information now even if you open the building menu via the building.
- If you played the game over several years, the entire city population got older, since no new characters were created. Of course, this bug had a big impact on the whole gameplay, because the city would eventually die out. We have fixed this now and a city should have natural generation changes.
While we began to fix the bug of the city's age issues, we were able to identify more bugs related to aging and life cycles.
- Many characters in a running game died a long time ago, and forgot to actually drop dead. They then instantly died when you got them married... We fixed that now and characters who die because of age will be removed correctly. This also has an effect on the performance in the game, as previously dead characters remained in the game, consuming processing power.
- If a character with a market cart dies, the cart will no longer remain on the road.
- Businesses that are not operated by a dynasty didn't replace dead employees. With the new version, these businesses now hire new employees.
- If an employee of a dynasty dies because of old age, then the player no longer loses all his buildings.
Please note: If you load an old game in which the bug was present, it can lead to poor performance / freezes when starting the map. This is because the game must go through the entire population to clean up these "zombie" characters and create new characters.

Art
The following buildings and walls have been optimized and provided with 3 additional LOD levels.
- Graveyard
- Grove
- Towers on city walls
- City gates 1 to 3
Known bugs
- The character portraits do not show the correct dynasty colors yet. We will address that in one of the following patches as we revise the portraits.

Important Information
After installing the latest patch, your previously saved games may no longer appear in the menu because the game recognizes them as "incompatible". If you have trouble loading or saving, then you can try to delete all files from the "Games" folder in the installation path 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: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your library, then Properties - "More" - Manage Installation - VERIFY/REPAIR

What we plan for the next patch...
- One of our major goals is to completely replace the current path-finding system in the game. In this context, we also want to solve many bugs that can be attributed to the path-finding system.
- We also want to add better feedback why some abilities cannot be applied on wrong targets.
- Furthermore, we want to provide more information on characters directly in the game world.
- In addition, we will also start to optimize performance and loading times.

A brief outlook...
In the patches after that we want to take care of the ability system in the game. For this we want to fundamentally change the way skills are created by our designers. The goal is to be able to create content related to character skills faster in the future.
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Your feedback is important to us!
We would greatly appreciate it if you have time for the following quick poll about the changes in patch EA 0.5.2: https://goo.gl/forms/7xp0KA0yxD1Svbeg1
Please note: We do not collect any data other than your feedback - it remains completely anonymous. This poll ends on July 15, 2018

Patch notes for version EA 0.5.3 - July 25, 2018

New features
- We analyzed the current pathfinding system and ultimately decided to revise it completely. As you may have guessed, this intervention was not trivial, since pathfinding is related to many other systems (such as actions, NPC behavior, and AI). Many of the bugs that currently cause characters to stand motionless on the streets are not related to pathfinding. Nonetheless, we ask you to pay close attention to the new pathfinding.
- With the new pathfinding system, characters try to side step. But if that's too much of a detour, characters move through others. As you can see in the game, pathfinding is much more natural and fluid. Another positive effect is that characters should not push each other anymore.
- As you have probably noticed, in the past it was often not possible to send the character to certain places on the street. This problem has occurred especially often at intersections. As part of the conversion to the new pathfinding system, we have now corrected this. You should now be able to move your character anywhere on the streets without any problems.
- One point that we have also improved with this version is the use of actions. As soon as an action is selected, the corresponding action icon is now displayed next to the mouse cursor. If you move the mouse pointer over an invalid target, the icon will be crossed out and a text will appear that explains why the target is not valid. At the same time, we have replaced the previously too-large tooltips of characters and buildings with smaller ones, as these often had hidden important elements in the HUD and were obstructing the view. Now it should be much easier for you to find a valid target for an action and then to select it.
- With this patch you can now get important information about dynasty characters right in the world: names, dynasty crests, the favor of your dynasty, the status of the character within the family, and the office. Employees are displayed only with the coat of arms of the dynasty. We think that the new "plaques" are very helpful, but you want to give you the freedom to decide for yourself: in the options you can set whether you want to see the "plaques" on characters, buildings, both or not at all. Furthermore, you can set whether you want to show the "plaques" only for your own dynasty or for all dynasties.
- We have reworked the system, which generates the water reflections and thereby among other things improved the performance. Furthermore, we have significantly improved the creation of the minimap when loading a scenario map, which has also shortened the loading times.

Bug fixes
- The game no longer crashes when certain characters can not be displayed.
- The game no longer crashes when you equip your characters with carts.
- We finalized another set of bug fixes and improvements for AI controlled dynasties:
- AI controlled dynasties should now be able to build businesses.
- AI controlled dynasties should now also buy building extensions for businesses and upgrade their buildings if they meet the requirements.
- AI controlled dynasties should now have stronger ambitions to expand their businesses, build new businesses, and compete in public office
- The Master AI is now able to “have work” for all employees over a longer period of time. To achieve this, the following problems were solved:
- The budget that the AI ​​has available now depends on how much money the dynasty has.
- The AI ​​now changes the production orders of the employees when the raw materials have gone out.
- The AI ​​for the transporters has been revised and should now be less error prone.
- The problem with invalid products should be fixed
- Building levels 2 and 3 have been adjusted slightly to ensure that there is enough space for all raw materials of high quality products without the purchase of additional inventory slots.
- The prioritization of which products the Master AI produces has been optimized
- If you switch the operation from automatic (Master AI) to manual, products are no longer placed in different storage slots.
- In some cases, transporters have not picked up the right items, even though they should be transported. This should now be solved.
- If more than one employee produces the same product, they will no longer be placed in different inventory slots.
- Different names for new buildings are proposed again.
- If special characters occur in a building name, which can not be displayed, then the building can be built anyway.
- The calculation of text lengths has been corrected to allow the size of the background texture of tooltips to be automatically created. Tooltip texts should therefore no longer be cut off and also displayed correctly centered. Furthermore, many texts that were previously shifted too far up or down, should now be properly aligned. Please keep your eyes open for further texts whose alignment we may need to correct.
- Characters no longer crash through bridges in certain places.
- Characters can now attack characters preparing for a ambush.
- Many characters (NPCs) did not move because they had been waiting for some action. This should now occur less frequently.
- Characters participating in interactions, like conversations or a fistfight, will now play the correct animations.
- Carts can now drive on all roads. This fix solves some horse cart and market issues. In some cases it does not look perfect yet, but we chose this step so that characters do not get stuck just because they are equipped with a horse cart.
- We have made several corrections in the localization system, which now displays a large number of missing names and labels within texts correctly. In most cases these were names of characters, buildings and measures. Please see if you notice any missing text.
- The buttons in the character creation should now all be displayed even at lower resolutions.
- The scroll bar in the overview of items when creating trade routes now works correctly.
- When changing the main residence your family members in the previous home building will move now to the new one.

Art
The following buildings have been optimized and each provided with 3 different LOD stages:
- Herbs hut
- Apothecary 1 to 3
- Scholar 1 to 3
- Hospital 1 to 3
- Robber camp
- Cathedral
- Well
- Quarry
- Mine
- Lumberyard
- Grove
- Cemetery
- More city walls and towers

Known Issues
- Larger objects such as ships and horse carts are still wiggling when they try to dodge each other.
- If you attack characters that are lurking for an ambush, they will most likely start another counter attack after the fight is over. At the moment this is a bit too common. Please let us know how you see it.
- Crowds of NPCs sometimes overlap one another right now. This mainly affects horse carts. We’ll checking that issue.
- In some cases NPCs may still get stuck when they are being interacted with. This is also the case in previous versions and does not have its cause in the pathfinding changes. We just wanted to mention this, so you know it does not have to be reported.
- Currently, NPCs fight each other very often and do not shy away from kids. We will adapt this.
- Children are currently trying to sit on benches. Since they have no animations for them, they stay on the bench and move in the state. The same applies to fighting.
- Character plaques adjust their length only to the name of the character, but not to its political position (e.g. mayor).
- If you still have other problems with the new pathfinding, please create a bug in Redmine, describes the situation, the location and attach the score to the ticket. So we can look specifically at the problems.

Important Information
Due to the changes to the pathfinding system old save games are not compatible anymore and loading an old save game will lead to errors.
If you have trouble loading or saving, then you can try to delete all files from the "Games" folder in the installation path 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: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your library, then Properties - "More" - Manage Installation - VERIFY/REPAIR


What we plan for the next patch...
- We want to fix the bug that causes AI-controlled NPCs to stop working after being interacted with.
- Through various measures we want to reduce the loading times of scenario maps.
- We want to further improve the performance. With special attention to savegames, which are stored / loaded.

A short outlook...
As already announced, we are currently working on rebuilding the action system for our designers so that actions and items will be easier to create in the future. This is a big change that will keep us busy for a bit longer. We hope to be able to create gameplay elements faster in the future.

Your feedback is important to us!
We would greatly appreciate it if you have time for the following quick poll about the changes in patch EA 0.5.3: https://goo.gl/forms/rISNQ1F1V1V4ZBQ73
Please note: We do not collect any data other than your feedback - it remains completely anonymous. This poll ends on August 8, 2018

Patch notes for version EA 0.5.4 – August 9, 2018

New features
- As announced, we have taken a look at the issues behind poor performance and inefficient memory usage when loading and playing savegames. We have now improved memory usage patterns which should result in shorter loading times and better performance in general (in particular when playing for extended periods of time and after loading savegames) in EA 0.5.4.
- To further improve performance, we have now implemented that only characters which are currently in the field of view of the camera are animated and not as before, every character on the map.
- Up until now, the amount of available products in the market hardly had an impact on price development. This has now been changed, so you should check more frequently if prices have shifted and if you need to optimise your supply chains. As part of these changes we have extracted many economy-related parameters from the code so that we can iterate more quickly in the future when it comes to the in-game economy.
- The re-work of the visualisation of selected characters is completed as of EA 0.5.4. You will now see a small bluish circle around all your characters. The circle of your dynasty leader will be gold-coloured. When you select one of your characters, the white circle will be highlighted more visibly. It should therefore now be easier to identify and select your own characters, especially within larger crowds.
- Character portraits which are displayed above buildings now display the profession and dynasty affiliation of a character. This should make it easier to select the correct character.
- The colour of the clothing in character portraits now also correctly reflects the dynasty colours. In order to reinforce this effect, we have replaced the blurry dynasty coat of arms in the background with the dynasty’s colour. Furthermore, we have adjusted the angle and distance from which character portraits are taken.
- When losing a game, it is no longer necessary to quit the entire game in order to begin a new one. Instead, you can now load a savegame or simply return to the main menu.
- Several maps have been re-worked in order to improve, performance as well as economy, available space for new buildings and arrangement of city districts. The following maps have been revised so far:
- Magdeburg
- Augsburg
- Visby
- Paris

Bug fixes
- Employees who are being controlled by the master AI will now immediately resume their activity after a savegame is loaded.
- Transporters will now resume their previously defined trade routes after a savegame is loaded.
- AI-controlled dynasties previously only reproduced if a marriage partner was already defined at the start of a scenario. Dynasties without marriage partners did not work towards achieving marriages, therefore leading to their eventual extinction. We have now implemented changes which will result in the AI socially interacting with other characters (paying compliments, entering relationships, marrying). The AI is currently not yet acting towards greater strategic plans when doing so, but this fix is merely the first improvement and we aim to continually improve this behaviour with upcoming updates.
- Characters should no longer get “stuck” as often when attempting to interrupt another character. The causes of this bug were particular distances and angles between the two characters.
- Abilities which interrupted the activity of NPCs will no longer interrupt their other routines. NPCs that just loiter around should therefore appear less frequently.
- The building menu of level 2 and 3 businesses should now open with a double-click on the building, as is already the case with level 1 businesses.
- Deceased characters will now no longer appear in residential buildings.
- Characters watching juggling performances will now no longer stand inside each other.
- The shadow calculation was improved so that shadows shouldn’t be cut off very close to the camera anymore.
- The white outline of selected characters should now also include their backpacks.
- Several texts were corrected, e.g. for henchmen, innkeepers, and news concerning the hospital and far distance travel.

Art
- The following buildings have been optimised and were given 3 additional LOD-levels.
- alchemist levels 1 - 3
- barracks levels 1 - 3
- warehouse
- Additionally the roof colour of all residential buildings without thatched roofs has been changed, thus making them easier to distinguish.

Known issues
- Certain barrels are currently missing textures.
- There are some errors in the behaviour of AI-dynasties which can lead to AI characters not finishing certain actions under specific conditions. We will continuing working to fix that system.
- In very rare cases you may get a crash related to missing items in a save game. We already found the issue and will fix it.

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: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your library, then Properties - "More" - Manage Installation - VERIFY/REPAIR


What we are planning for the next patch
- A re-work of the HUD, making it easier to understand, navigate and find information.
- Based on community feedback, we want to change the rules according to which the player avatar is selected.
- We will complete the refactoring of the skills system in order to allow our designers to begin repairing, improving and iterating on character skills.

A short outlook...
We will shift our main focus to character skills and improve the construction of buildings.

Patch notes for version EA 0.5.5 – August 29, 2018

New features
- With EA 0.5.5 we changed the HUD almost completely. We hope that you find the new arrangement of the HUD elements more comfortable.
- We've moved the portrait of your avatar - it lead to irritations, because the position of the portrait was similar to where the currently selected character is displayed in other games. In the upper left corner you now find all functionalities which relate directly to your dynasty. Many of you assumed that the XP bar showed the experience of your avatar, but instead the XP bar shows the experience of your entire dynasty. To make its meaning more obvious we placed the crest of the dynasty, the XP bar, your dynasty's title in roman numbers and your money in the top-left corner. Additionally you have access to the skill book, the diary and the statistics. You can open your family tree by clicking on your family's crest.
- Selected objects (characters, buildings) are displayed at the bottom left from now on. When you select a character, you will see his/her current activity near the the portrait. Next to that, you will also find all the available actions for the selected object.
- Several of you asked if we could change the selection system so that there mustn't always be a selected object, and we changed that with this patch. If you from now on left-click somewhere in the world, you will release your current selection. In order to make it comfortable for you to access your avatar at any time you can simply click your avatar’s portrait - or simply press the "C" key, like before. A white outline shows you if the character is selected.
- With this version we introduce a brand new character inspection window. You can access it via the "i" button next to the selected character and via the “i” key on your keyboard (if the selected object is a building, then the "i" key and button open the production or trade menu). In the inspection window you can see the equipment, attributes and other details at a glance. We will add more values in the future. And we will implement that you first need to spy on someone before you are able to see what is inside their inventory. We hope that you like the new and well-arranged character inspection window.
- In the upper center of the HUD you find all options which are related to your opponents and/or with the city: Questbook, Book of Dynasties, Book of Societies and City Records.
- We have changed the time display and the display of the game speed in the upper right, so that it needs less space. When you pause the game the display blinks in red. You can find the name of the scenario map on which you are playing by opening the area map.
- The size of the button that opens the "erect building" menu has been reduced and moved to the bottom right, next to the compass.
- When you use actions with a cooldown you can now see the remaining time until you can use the action again.
- The scenario map "Vienna and Presporok" has been optimized regarding performance. The map itself will be re-worked in a later patch.

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 are now able to implement status effects, both temporary and permanent. Status effects are affecting the status of a character, e.g. a disease changes the character status from "healthy" to "ill", with a wide range of attribute modifiers.
- The new system allows us to create effects with duration related impact. For example, we can have "healing over time" for potions and "damage over time" for poisons.
- We are now able to trigger effects in multiple ways. For example, a disease can have different temporary effects or a poison can permanently reduce the character’s movement speed.
- With the new activity and effects system we can now define critical successes and critical failures for actions. Meaning, that some actions may have grand successes or dramatic failures in the future - depending on your character's skills, on the skills of the target and other circumstances :)

Bug fixes
- Fixed a crash when an AI dynasty tried to compliment a citizen.
- Fixed a crash when you clicked on the dead leader of another dynasty in the Book of Dynasties.
- It was possible that the game crashed when you clicked with the right mouse button in the main menu.
- From now on, tooltips should only be displayed when they are supposed to be displayed.
- Ships and horse carts will change their direction more smoothly now.
- The confirm button is always displayed from now on when you build a new building, except if there's no name in the input box.
- Fixed a bug where on some maps certain businesses could not be built, even though all the requirements were met. This fix only works on new games, if you have a savegame with this issue it will still persist.
- Fixed an issue on the Magdeburg map where Characters would have issues entering the mine and the grove north of the city.
- The purchasing habits of citizens has been adjusted. From now on you should find more resources in the market and the price evolution for items should be improved.

Art
- The following buildings have been optimised and were given 3 additional LOD-levels.
- port
- marketplace

Known issues
- Some of the building portraits do not yet fit properly into the new selected building portrait display.
- Character models in the inspection window do not get updated when they change clothes.
- Character portraits sometimes need a few seconds before the portrait of the character appears after a game has been loaded
- When you keep a building which is under construction selected until it is finished, its action bar is not present until you select another building and then the new building again.

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: 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 improve the process of erecting new buildings, incl. the search for a building plot.
- We will implement a new AI master system for automating your workers and transporters in your businesses.
- We will continue our efforts to optimize the current AI in order to reduce the possibility that AI characters got stuck in endless loops.

A short outlook...
Our designers will start to repair and finalize actions and artefacts as well as implement new ones.

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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 0.5.5: https://goo.gl/forms/BLY0VkvXIVH8bDDq1
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 0.5.6 .

Patch notes for version EA 0.5.6 – September 26th, 2018

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: 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.

**********

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 .

Patch notes for version EA 0.5.7 – October 17th, 2018

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: 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/94nzUmlx5zXJPCFJ3
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 .

Patch notes for version EA 0.5.8 – November 2nd, 2018

New features
- We implemented a new detection system for all kinds of surveillance actions (eg. guarding). This updated system is used by city guards and lansquenets. The radius shown around a detecting character now reflects the actual area in which the character may perceive illegal or aggressive behavior. Circles are shown when the scanning character is selected or by pressing space on your keyboard. Inside the guard's awareness circle, illegal or aggressive behavior will be detected and, depending on the laws in the city, acted upon.
After all potential “perpetrators” are identified a dice roll is executed against every action. Based on the outcome the scanning character is intervening or not. With that new system the overall guard gameplay should make way more fun.
- With 0.5.8 you will now also see lots of secondary attributes in the character inspection window. These are mostly attributes that are used to influence the outcome of actions. We also added tooltips to all attributes so you can get more information on what they actually do. We intend to add more attributes in the future and also extend the tooltip information. Nevertheless we think this should already help you a bit.
- We also added tooltips to status effects. So from now on when you move your mouse cursor over the status effect of a burning house or a poisoned character, you should get more useful information.
- We added a new category to the action bar of characters: Usable items. In there you will find the actions unlocked by items in your inventory, like throwing a bomb or using potions. We will add more item actions in upcoming patches.
- We further changed the way building placement works. In this iteration we removed the snapping to nearby buildings. This way the placement feels less jumpy and you should have an easier time finding the right spot.
- We started reworking some of the usable items and actions and added cooldowns to some of them.
- We further iterated how item prices are calculated. Before EA 0.5.8, only the original price of ingredients was taken into consideration. With the new version the current prices of the ingredients are taken into account. This results in stronger varying prices based on the market situation.
- With the new version important texts (eg. city names, character names, dynasty names, etc.) are highlighted with different colors or font formats, so it’s easier to identify them in bigger text blocks.

New features (under the hood)
- We continued working on fixing the way actions and interruption of actions is working. There is still a way to go but in this version action should already be more robust particularly in combination with combat.
- Our new “actor value system” and “modifier effects” can now also be used by items and skills.
- Right now we are also refactoring a lot of files so we can reduce compilation times. The goal is to further increase our productivity.

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
- Fixed a bug which placed building on the edge of the map if the game was saved and loaded while the building was under construction.
- Fixed a bug that caused NPCs to remain in front in a house that they just burned down.
- The game doesn’t react on mouse wheel input anymore if you move your mouse cursor out of the game window.
- Fixed bug that allowed the AI to produce items which weren’t unlocked yet.
- Fixed a bug that turned characters invisible when their houses had been burned down.
- Fixed a bug that caused the leader to get stuck in the market.
- Fixed a bug that allowed players and AI to upgrade level 1 businesses which are only allowed to be upgraded and placed within the city.
- Fixed a bug that caused buildings to not show the fire particles anymore after too many buildings were already on fire.
- Fixed a bug that caused the robber camp to have a missing texture after the building had been conquered.
- Fixed a bug that caused the character model to not be updated in the inspection window after a new cloth item had been equipped.
- Fixed a character model with a wrong texture.
- Fixed seasonal impact on resources. The production times of resources that grow are now dependent on the current month of the year.
- Fixed that the windmill is also showing fire particles when the building is on fire.
- Fixed multiple crashes that were caused when the AI wanted to execute pickpocketing actions without finding suitable targets.
- Fixed a bug where guard detection circles did not disappear after a guard died.
- Fixed that not all areas of the brushwood were clickable.

Performance
- We improved the way the game checks if an inventory has available space. The function used to do that required a significant portion of CPU time. The function has been reworked which should give you another slight increase of performance.

Known issues
- Currently guards are really persistent and will follow your characters until they catch them. They will even wait in front of the buildings. So basically as soon as they discovered illegal behavior they will get you. We will of course change that in the future.

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: 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 make gameplay more transparent, so we are adding a new system to give you feedback directly in the game world.
- We will further work on the production system, so gathering businesses start working properly as well.
- We will also continue working on how guards are spawned and respawned so the overall legal/illegal gameplay gets a nicer touch.
- As mentioned in the last patch we will also change the way heirs are appointed in your family. This is a first step for bigger changes coming related to the player’s family.
- Of course we will continue working on the action system to make it less error prone. As a result we hope that we will have less and less issues with stuck characters in the future.

A short outlook...
We will put the emphasis on how to manage your family and what to do with the different family members. The character development part is still a bit thin in the game and it’s something that we want to change.

**********

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 0.5.8: Google Form
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 0.5.9.

Patch notes for version EA 0.5.9 – November 16th, 2018

New features
- Finally! As you know feedback on what’s happening in the game world has been a big issue for us. A lot of information was either not shown at all or as a notification (lower left side in the HUD). The notification center got spammed really quickly with updates on health changes of characters, etc. Additionally the impact of the results of actions (eg. complimenting someone) were very hidden. We wanted to change that. So with the new version you get feedback directly in the game world for giving/receiving damage, applying status effects, spending/earning money, reputation changes and it also shows if a dice roll was a perfect success, success, failure or critical failure. In order to clean-up the notification system we removed notifications which are now covered by the new floating text system. We hope that action gameplay is now a lot clearer. Enjoy!
- We implemented a new fallback system to the market. From now on base resources (eg. iron, fat, etc.) are added to the market in certain intervals if the market stock of those resources falls beneath a threshold. This way the economy should be more stable in the beginning.
- Another economy/production system change was introduced with 0.5.9 to improve gathering businesses. With the new system, components which are used to craft higher level products will only be sold by the business if there are still enough to support the production pipeline.
- You now have a checkbox available in the production menu to enable/disable the front store. It’s not activated by default. If you have automated transporters and the checkbox is set, items will be put in the front store as well.
- The amount of city guards is now linked to the neighbourhood. If a city guard dies (naturally or by your mean actions) a new city guard is appointed by the city after a while and then sent to the assigned district to take on duties. It should now also be possible to change the amount of city guards per neighbourhood if you hold the correct office.
- In preparation for features to come, we changed the way your heir is appointed. Before this change, the heir was appointed after your current leader died. This of course removes a lot of interesting aspects, like having some actions only be available to your heir or making the heir vulnerable to other dynasties. It’s also not really fitting the setting as usually the first born is automatically appointed as the heir. So what did we change? From now on your first born will be appointed as heir but that’s not all. You can also manually appoint another character of your family as heir directly in the family tree. If you do that please consider that your previous heir won’t like it and receive the “humiliated by family” status effect which affects the character’s stats. This implementation is the preparation for bigger things to come related to your family.
- Thieves are from now on taking their chance of success and the wealth of their targets into account when deciding who they want to pickpocket.

New features (under the hood)
- We have integrated support for text styling, e.g. outlines and color highlighting etc., enabling us to do more advanced text formatting.
- Health has been integrated with the character and building attributes, adding a lot more flexibility to what actions and items can do to it.
- We continued refactoring the error prone action system. That system is the base for most of the action and economy gameplay so we want to make that as solid as possible.
- We continued to refactor the code to reduce compile time thus improving development speed.

Content
- Boozy Breath beer has been added. Provide your competitors with a horrible breath and lower their charisma and reputation.
- Dr. Faustus Elixir was added and increases the max health of the character who uses it.
- You can now write a poem to impress the other gender. It’s slightly more powerful than just giving a compliment.
- We updated most of the equippable items in the game to support the new attributes and derivative attributes.
- We adjusted the amount of money you receive from Ambush and Pickpocket. Money amounts should now be more reasonable.

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
- Fixed a number of bugs which under certain circumstances caused the game to crash on start-up.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when a game was saved and loaded while sending a female character on a long distance travel. Yes, it is as weird as it sounds.
- Fixed a bug that caused the find evidence action to crash.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the find evidence action was interrupted before the first valid target was identified.
- Fixed a bug that caused the portrait to not get updated when a new item is equipped.
- Fixed a bug that caused the face you chose in the character creation to change after the game started.
- Fixed a bug that caused the scroll bar to not resize correctly in the production UI which prevented you from hiring additional employees.
- Fixed a bug that caused the dagger to not disappear after the eliminate action has been used.
- Removed the button to cancel the current action for employees which have been automated in the production window.
- Removed the amount controller UI in the market as it is not used anymore since EA 0.5.8.
- Fixed a bug that caused some actions to show twice in the action bar.
- Fixed a bug that caused the eliminate action to not show any feedback when the action fails.
- Fixed pricing for Brocade and Silk.
- Fixed a bug that prevented guards from dying of old age.
- Fixed a bug that allowed npcs to set a building under construction on fire.
- Fixed a bug that prevented amounts from being shown in the grove and other gathering buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused thieves to always steal from the same victim.

Performance
- We improved the performance when the market UI is opened a lot.
- Health was being updates very often so that it had a big impact on performance. We fixed this and additionally reworked the functionality so it should no longer cause such a performance loss.

Known issues
- Currently we are exchanging all the bonuses with our new actor value and modifier effect system. That’s why bonuses of items are not shown in EA 0.5.9. It’s already in the works and you will see item effects again in EA 0.6.0.
- We identified an issue that causes the performance to drop if a garrison is destroyed as your employees who are outside patrolling don’t get properly removed. Firing of employees who are currently executing an action outside the building is a bigger thing which we want to solve properly. We didn’t want to delay the release of the EA 0.5.9, so the bugfix will be delivered probably with the next patch.

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: 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 are very excited about EA 0.6.0 because we will release character levelling with that version. So you will be able to level up your characters and upgrade their attributes.
- We will introduce a cleaned up action bar, so it’s easier to find actions.
- We will change when, and if, the building UIs are automatically opened when a character is selected.
- We will also show costs on activities so you don’t get surprised anymore when going on a far distance travel.
- We will continue to fix issues in the action system to make it less error prone.

A short outlook…
Soon we will completely change how you procreate, how your family tree works and how attributes are passed on to your children.

**********

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 0.5.9: https://goo.gl/forms/5UJq1zkdpna66IaA3
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 0.6.0.

Patch notes for version EA 0.6.0 – November 30th, 2018

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: 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.

**********

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.

Patch notes for version EA 0.7.0 – December 21st, 2018 Part 1

With this patch we are directly jumping from 0.6.0 to 0.7.0 as we are introducing a major change on how you are able to play with your family. Beside that, production of goods is now limited to business buildings while you can produce special items in your residence. In order to be able to do that, we had to touch many parts in the code. We are all really excited about the version and hope that you are as well!

New features
- Here it is. From EA 0.7.0 you are now able to play with all your family members (from the age 5 on). They will show up as a portrait above your residence. The actions a character can execute depend on his/her status. There is a difference between Leader, Spouse, Heir, juvenile or adult other family members. Adults can work in your businesses like employees can. Children have a set of special children actions available which can come in handy as you will see. On the upper left we updated the quick access UI, so you are able to quick select your leader, spouse and heir. Doing actions with your characters earns them XP but of course it also makes them more vulnerable as they usually need to leave the house for that.
- With EA 0.7.0 we also changed that lots of the “basic” character actions (eg. Attack someone) are available right from the start.
- As the family became more important now with EA 0.7.0 we also fixed and reworked the family tree UI. It supports now all the different cases of marrying characters in and away. If you marry a character from another dynasty into your family you will still be able to see her origin dynasty crest. If you marry away a character you will see in which family the character was married into. Your dynasty tree mainly focuses on the “true bloodline”, which means, that if a dynasty member marries a second time (because the first spouse died) only the actual spouse is shown.
- Another big change related to the whole family system is the way you grow your family. From now on you can find the “Produce Offspring” action in the leader’s action bar. The action can only be “executed” when both spouses are in the home residence. As soon as the action is triggered both characters are blocked for a while. If you are lucky the female character will get pregnant. Pregnant characters will give birth to a child after 9 months. During that time the pregnant character has an active status effect which buffs and debuffs some attributes. In order to make that more interesting we added a new attribute to characters: Fertility. Fertility naturally decreases after a certain age but may also be modified with potions and traits in the future. But that’s not it yet. We added around 30 birth traits which are affecting the child’s attributes and derivative attributes. Base attribute points and birth traits depend on the attributes and traits of the mother and the father. Sometimes you will be lucky, sometimes your child will be an ugly no-good. We also updated the “child is born” user interface in order to reflect all the changes mentioned above.
- With EA 0.7.0 we are happy to introduce a feature that many of you long waited for: production of goods is now limited to business buildings only! We have reworked the skill tree so that you are now able to build or purchase a business building from the first skill level on. You also start with more money so that you can erect your first business directly after the game starts.
- We added a number of special items that you can only produce in your residence. These items are not for trade. We will add more of those special items in the future. If you have ideas for more special items, then please write a comment :)
- Actions are now bound to characters, which means that depending on the character type actions will be shown in the action bar or not.
- We also added that some items can only be used by adults and some only by children.
- With EA 0.7.0 you will see that characters have a bunch of new derivative attributes.
- The AI is now only using actions with their characters which they are allowed to use. Before they were using all actions available.
- Buildings are now correctly decaying over time and need to be repaired.
- We also improved the interception of characters a lot. From now on the pathfinding of characters should be way more intelligent when plotting a path to intercept another character. Additionally we added a slight speed buff to the character who is following another, so it’s easier to catch up.
- You are now able to turn VSync on and off in the options menu.

New features (under the hood)
- Designers are now able to create simple actions in the game directly in a script file and do not need to create them directly in C++ anymore.
- Designers are now able to create modifier effects in a more flexible way so it’s easier to create new status effects.
- Designers are now able to correctly define which character type is allowed to use what action without duplicating actions. This makes the creation of new actions less error prone.
- Designers are now able to define unlocks with a unified system. This makes content creation and progression balancing way easier.
- Designers are now able to create status effects that trigger result effects in certain intervals while they are active. This will allow us to create more interesting actions and effects.
- Designers are now able to define specific buildings as target filters when creating an action.
- Designers are now able to define more easily what items can be produced where.

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.

Balancing
The early experience was for a long time a thorn in our side. The ability to be able to produce the same items in the residence as in the according level 1 business, kinda made the first business not very useful. Additionally it basically lead to the gameplay of just sending your leader back and forth until the next title was achieved. We wanted to change that and now that we have a more interesting family gameplay we decided that the time is right.
- We changed the early progression entirely. You are now able to build a business building from the start.
- You are now able to produce so called “social items” in your residence. Those items boost your basic attributes. We’ll add more items in the future and we will also add actions in the future that you can trigger directly in your residence.
- Your residence starts with 6 storage slots now.
So with those changes you should be able to start your business and still be able to focus with your leader on building up a dynasty.

Content
- Your family members can now beg for money on the streets. Be aware that the few coins may hold you above water but your reputation will suffer.
- Children can now throw stones at other characters to make them dizzy. It’s not illegal to do that!
- Children can now divert guards but be aware guards don’t react friendly when they don’t like the performance.
- Children can drop a bag of fleas next to a building. The fleas are spreading to the employees and harm their productivity.
- Adults can now goad your workers. If they do it well, your workers will work faster. If not, well, they won’t like that.
- Adults can now whip your transporters. If they do it right, your transporters will be faster.
- You are now able to gather water from the well. Water can be used for wash cloth.
- Washcloth can be produced in your residence and used to clean a character. Being clean boosts your charisma.
- Flower Bouquet can be produced in your residence. Give it to another character to boost romance and reputation.
- Fixed and changed the “Find Evidence” action. Characters will now question people in the neighborhood if they saw something illegal. If yes, you will obtain an evidence you can then use to bargain or to initiate a trial.
- All scenario maps got another overhaul. Lots of bugfixes. One or more wells are now present in every district and village. Besides every well and marketplace got the name of the district or village were they are located. Groves and brushwoods got unique names.
- We removed the scenario map Birmingham as the map contains too many problems and it doesn’t offer a good experience at the moment.

Refactoring
- We entirely removed the bonsuable system (a system which had been used for all kinds of things in the game) and exchanged it with our modifier effects system. This allows us to be more flexible and we were able to solve a number of memory leaks, so that the game becomes more stable and performant in longer play sessions.

Performance
- Surplus vegetation and decorations have been reduced in all scenario maps to improve performance.

Art
- We updated the whole lighting of the game and fixed lots of bugs related to the overall rendering of the game. One of the biggest things you will recognize is that the strong grayish look has been removed by fixing the tone mapper. We also added moonlight to the game so nights got a more “bluish” tone. Generally the lighting now fully depends on the time of day.
- We added animations to male and female children.

Patch notes for version EA 0.7.0 – December 21st, 2018 Part 2

Bug fixes
- We have hunted down a very dodged bug with the far trade markets on water which sometimes led to a crash when you came back from a trip.
- Fixed that it was possible to have multiple different outcomes per action, which lead to lots of follow up bugs.
- Fixed Give Money action to show the correct amount of money transferred.
- Fixed a bug that allowed henchmen to conquer their own buildings.
- Fixed the give gift action to work properly.
- Fixed a bug that removed all producible items from a building after it had been sold off to another dynasty.
- Fixed a bug that allowed you to buy buildings you control.
- Fixed a bug that broke animations when the game gets very slow.
- Fixed a bug that prevented modified attributes to be correctly shown in the tooltip.
- Fixed a bug that prevented transporters from getting XP when buying or selling items.
- Fixed a bug that lead calendar entries to be different to the current game time.
- Fixed a bug that caused the leader to be stuck in front of the city hall after being released from prison.
- Fixed a bug that allowed juveniles to apply for political offices.
- Fixed a bug that caused thieves to steal money from the remaining budget of a business, which lead to dead-locked business buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused the “use front store” setting to not being saved correctly when saving the game.
- Fixed a bug that caused employees to remain in another building after being fired.
- Fixed a bug that caused particles to never die.
- Fixed a bug that caused shadows to be hidden when an object is outside of the view frustum of the camera.
- Fixed a bug that caused the far distance travel action to not work on London map.
- Fixed a bug that caused tooltips to still being shown despite being outside of the game window with the mouse cursor.
- Fixed several bugs related to the price calculations of buildings.
- Fixed a bug that caused ships to not being shown anymore.
- Fixed a bug that caused all automated workers continually try to produce the same item while they lack the resources.
- Dozens of text corrections.
- Many missing texts added.

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: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your library, then Properties - "More" - Manage Installation - VERIFY/REPAIR

What we are planning for the next patch
In the next patch we will release an upgraded romance system and we will finally also release bigger changes related to titles and skills. We are also working on the unification of very important tooltips and what information they contain.

A short outlook…
As already mentioned last time we are heavily working on the combat system and creating a proper dynasty AI. Beside that we are working on finalizing more scenario maps.

**********

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 0.7.0: Google Form
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 0.7.1.

Patch notes for version EA 0.7.1 – January 18th, 2019

With our last version we changed the way your family is played and how the family is extended. Our new version focuses on how to lay the foundation for your dynasty and how you are able to “Habsburg”* your competitors ;) This version contains a few things we are really happy to release to you today and get your feedback on.
(*The house of Habsburg was famous for expanding their assets and empire through clever marriages with other dynasties. Tu felix Austria nube!)

New features
- The romance system has been changed. From now on you have to start a romance with a character before you can make that character your liaison or even marry them. As soon as a romance is started you can improve the affection score between your character and your romance. Unlike before, you are now able to make advances (liaison, marriage proposal) to a romance whenever you want. Nevertheless be aware that if you do that too early that your romance won’t like that if affection isn’t high enough yet.
- As often requested we now integrated a UI that provides you with a list of potential candidates for a romance. This UI opens as soon as you click the “Embark on a romance” button. We know that some of you like to pick your potential romance candidates directly in the game world. That’s why we added a button to the UI that allows you to pick a character directly in the game world. If you don’t have a romance, you will be informed if you try to start a liaison or make a marriage proposal. Though if you have romances, you will also get the quick selection UI when making a marriage proposal or when you want to start a liaison.
- From now on your avatar, spouse and heir is able to start romances with family members of other dynasties. Your heir is now also able to marry and produce offspring. This way you are able to further strengthen your dynasty’s future.
- So now the really cool stuff is coming. If you are more the “Habsburg” kind of person you are now able to try to marry the heir of another dynasty into your family. You can do that only in a very sneaky way. You need to make the competitor’s heir fall in love with you and then do a rushed wedding (not via “Dynastic trade”). If your competitor is not disinheriting his or her heir, you will get 75% of all the money and influence, all businesses and all houses (except the main residence) when your competitor’s leader leaves the mortal world. So be very careful who your heir is hanging out with! We are really happy about that change as it allows you to take over properties of your competitors without violence.
- You probably were asking yourselves what the “influence” is we mentioned above. Well the overall way of getting titles with XP didn’t sit really well with us. That’s why with EA 0.7.1 we introduced a new “currency” called Influence. Influence can be seen as your political power. Claiming titles or executing some actions requires you to use your influence. Influence can be gained through expanding your businesses and by executing certain actions. In the future, political offices will also provide you with influence regularly. The amount of influence you currently have is shown right below the money display in the upper left corner of your HUD. We hope that you are as excited as we are about the influence concept. In the upcoming patches we will add more interesting influence driven actions to the game and will also further work on balancing.
- In order to have XP only on characters we also removed XP from unlocking dynasty skills as well. Skills can be now unlocked for your dynasty with money and influence. Additionally we changed the way the skill trees are presented. From now on it should be way more clear why skills are locked and what’s needed to unlock them.
- Another problem we wanted to solve with EA 0.7.1. are tooltips for titles, skills, items, etc. Lots of players aren’t used to the right-click + hold controls for showing more detailed tooltips. Additionally lots of level 1 tooltips (the ones shown on mouse over) were not very useful with their limited amount of information. That’s why from now on you will get a way more detailed tooltip on mouse over. The right-click + hold pattern has been removed as it’s not needed anymore. As we also wanted to make the tooltips more useful, we changed the layout and the way information is generally presented. We hope that you like it but we think tooltips are now way more useful.
- Lots of you gave feedback that you would like that your family members are not bound to the working times in businesses. We changed that. From now on your family members can work 24/7.
- The diary was removed from the game. It was not essential for the gameplay and it was also one of the main causes for the game getting quickly slower over time!

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.

Balancing
- Updated prices for titles and skills.
- Changed some of the cooldowns.
- Starting businesses start with more inventory slots.

Content
- New action “Sweet talk”: Increase your romances affection towards you by talking with them in a very very private way.
- New action “Kiss cheek”: Kiss your romance to increase affection. Beware to do that when the time is right.
- New action “Ask favor”: This action only works on liaisons. You can ask your liaison to talk well about your family. If done correctly, your reputation in your liaison’s family and their home neighborhood will rise.
- New action “Use connections”: Ask your liaison to spread good things about you with their political connections. If it works out you will be rewarded with influence.
- New action “Manipulate Liaison”: You can try to manipulate your liaison to get influence or even find some evidence.
- New action “Boast”: Boast about all your great achievements publicly. This is also a way to increase your influence.
- New action “Donate to Church”: Donate to the church to get a higher standing with the church officials and therewith get more influence.
- New action “Grease the wheels”: Bribe public servants to increase your influence.
- New action “Bribe Office Holder”: Bribe an office holder to gain political influence.

Performance and stability
EA 0.7.0 was a very big update and unfortunately some new issues were introduced that decreased stability and performance. That’s why we focused a lot on those 2 aspects in the last sprint. Everything related to stability can be found in the bug fixes section. In order to improve performance we removed the diary, changed parts of the pathfinding and rendering reflections in the water.

Bug fixes
- Implemented that a required .dll is always installed with the game in order to prevent the game from not starting up at all.
- Text files which were broken or even saved in the wrong format were leading to crashes. Therefore we implemented that if a text file is broken or in the wrong format, you will be informed with a message when the game starts.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when sending kids to school.
- Fixed a crash in the business AI.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when transferring items.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when declaring a feud via a building.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the player tried to equip too many items.
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to receive money or influence when cancelling an action.
- Fixed a bug that caused the AI to produce items despite not having the blueprints/recipes unlocked yet.
- Fixed a bug that allowed the AI to use building actions which weren’t unlocked yet.
- Fixed a bug that caused the AI of a dynasty to not appoint a new heir after the leader died.
- Fixed a bug that caused the characters in the marriage scene to be wrongly arranged.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to not show the CTRL icon in the loading screen.
- Fixed a bug that caused liaisons to be lost after saving and loading a game.
- Fixed a bug that caused guards not to react when you stole from them.
- Fixed a bug that allowed children to use the compliment action.
- Fixed a bug that caused gathering employees to stop working after transporters have been automated.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to give wrong feedback when equipping items which were not valid on the selected character.
- Removed the not-working propose marriage button in the dynasty UI.
- Fixed a bug that caused the recipe for the guard dog to show up twice in the skill tree.
- Fixed that the “Serf” label was shown beneath every residence building in the building menu.
- Fixed a bug that caused transporters to buy resources for items that are not even unlocked yet.
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to get stuck in the church scene when sending a character into the church but deselecting the character before entering.

Patch notes for version EA 0.7.1 – January 18th, 2019 Part 2

Known issues
- Buildings are decaying over time, so they should be repaired from time to time. But the npc dynasties are currently ignoring the decay of their buildings so that their buildings eventually collapse.

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: right-click on "The Guild 3" in your library, then Properties - "More" - Manage Installation - VERIFY/REPAIR

What we are planning for the next patch
The next patch will be the most brutal one so far: Combat. We will introduce a new combat system, with some new attributes, balancing and most importantly more than just 1 on 1 fights :) You will also see a slightly updated notification window, which will just be the start for a more useful notification system. Stay tuned.

A short outlook…
We are fully working on the competitor AI, the politics system and finally also now on sounds. We are really looking forward to updating the audio experience for you all.

**********

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 0.7.1: https://goo.gl/forms/HKhhizJJsiwEJbox1
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 0.7.2.

Patch notes for version EA 0.7.3 – February 15th, 2019

As already mentioned in our last community update we were skipping the EA 0.7.2 version. All the changes we had in the EA 0.7.2 are included in the EA 0.7.3 version. We are all very excited about your feedback as we changed and added a lot in EA 0.7.3. The combat system and most of the related actions (eg. guarding) were completely reworked. You will see the first draft of our new AI system in the game. We added new life into the game by adding scenario intros, lots of sounds and voice overs. There are lots of other changes in that version as well, which you can check-out in the patch notes below. Have fun!

New features
- We completely reworked the combat system. Characters can now join fights or even start fights with multiple characters. So no more just 1 on 1 fights.
- With the new combat system characters that fall below a certain healthpoint threshold are not dying but are getting unconscious and cannot take part in the fight anymore. After a fight is over the character will stay unconscious until a certain amount of health points have been regenerated. While a character is unconscious, the character cannot defend himself or herself anymore. There are now some actions that can ONLY be executed on unconscious characters.
- Multiple parties are now able to join a fight. For instance city guards will now join a fight on the side of the character who reacted on an illegal action. Also guarding (building, area or character) lansquenets or henchmen are joining battles now. To make it easier to see who’s fighting for whom all characters of the opponent side are getting a red circle while the fight is ongoing.
- A fight ends if all characters of one side are unconscious. The still standing and victorious characters can then apply post combat actions on the poor fellows on the ground.
- The pre and post combat UI window was completely removed as it was first very interrupting (particularly if you had lots of thieves/robbers) and second it created lots of issues for multiplayer games.
-- Before a combat starts the target checks whether it should try to flee or fight. If the character decides to flee, a dice roll is executed. If successful the character runs away. If not, then the fight is started. The surrender action was removed.
-- After a victory you can now select the actions Steal, Break Bones, Kill or Kidnap (depending on your character) in the action menu (Attack category) and apply the action you want on the unconscious character.
- We also changed that attacking someone is finally illegal. So be careful where you attack someone, guards will not pass by without joining the fight.
- Henchmen who are assigned to guard a character or building will also join fights if the guarded building is under attack or if the protected character attacks or is attacked.
- The armor system changed as well now. There is a new derivative attribute called damage reduction, which reduces the amount of damage taken.
- With EA 0.7.3 we generally added that characters when they die are showing a death animation and are not just vanishing like they did before.
- We entirely reworked and fixed the sound system in the game as well. The game before felt really dead without all the ambient and sound effects. We added now sounds to most of the actions, to all scenario maps and buildings and we will add more in the future. Additionally we added voice sets for children and three different sets for male and female characters. As a next step we are going to implement the narrator voice overs to the game.
- As you all know we are not very happy with what the AI is doing or rather not doing in the game. Therefore we started implementing a new AI system into the game. With EA 0.7.3 you can experience the first iteration of the AI objective system. We of course will keep working on that in the following sprints.
-- The moral alignments of the AI were changed from 6 different values to 3 different values. The moral alignments of dynasties when starting the game will be mainly dependent on their select profession. The moral alignments will further change depending on the actions the AI is executing.
-- From now on the AI will use all their family members to execute actions.
-- The AI will now select the skills they want to unlock based on their moral values.
-- The AI will now follow objectives. The objectives they select are also dependent on their moral values. The objectives they follow are influencing the actions the AI wants to execute. The type of objectives available for the AI are depending on the current title of a dynasty. This way we want to make sure that the AI is shifting their focus, the more powerful they get.
-- The AI will now also react on immediate loss threats like being out of money, missing an heir or having no house.
- We added a new lose condition to the game. So from now on you can lose from getting bankrupt. So ongoing costs like salaries will actually NOT be capped at 0 anymore but will get your account below 0. If you are not getting back into the black numbers within a year, the game is lost. To make all that more transparent we are added a warning UI that shows you what’s threatening you and how long you have still time to solve it.
- In all the scenarios you are now getting a short intro sequence, fully narrated based on the scenario settings.
- From now on NPC Citizens will take hold of office positions if there are no dynasty applicants. From now on all offices are having an office holder from the very beginning.
- The change mentioned above finally allowed us to setup the desired starting conditions for your scenarios. We removed all the already existing AI dynasties and their buildings from all maps. All AI dynasties will be freshly created at game start and will now have the same starting conditions like the player. As a result there is now more space for buildings to be placed and the amount of opponents you select in the map settings will be correct.
- For the kidnapping action we added a selection UI for buildings (similar to the romance windows) so you can decide where to chain a hostage.
- With the new version the UI will now scale correctly with your screen resolution.
- We exchanged the previous font with a new font. First we wanted to make all the text more readable and second we wanted to use a font that covers all the necessary characters of other languages.
- You can now also see a new notification overview window which shows all the notifications you received. We are still working on the notifications, so soonish that feature should become more useful.
- We also made some small changes on the politics system. From now on applying for an office costs influence. Additionally we fixed the UI to correctly show what’s the highest office seat within a chamber.
- Since a lot of feedback came in regarding the micro management of the whole family we also added the possibility to your home residence, to assign ongoing actions to your family members. This way you only need to micro-manage them if you want to.
- In our survey for patch EA 0.7.1 a lot of you reported that you had a hard time figuring out what actions help you gain influence. We added the influence you receive when successfully executing the action to the “Rewards” section of the action’s tooltip.
- The actionbar categories now show 10 icons per page instead of 5 to more effectively use the space we have.

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.

[end of part 1]