Greetings, aspiring businessmen and businesswomen!
We’re back with another dev diary for The Guild - Europa 1410 - this time, with a focus on your business, and the first steps within the political sphere of your medieval world. We’ll uncover some of the professions that will be available, along with how a typical day in your business and city may look like.
But before we get into it, we want to share a major development milestone: we’re preparing for our first Closed Gameplay Tests! If you’d like to help shape the future of The Guild - Europa 1410 and share your feedback, you’ll find all the details at the end of this dev diary. Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Picking Your Starting Profession
When you begin your journey in The Guild – Europa 1410, one of your first and most important decisions will be your starting profession. This choice defines not only your primary source of income but also the way you experience the game. Each profession offers unique opportunities - some rely on crafting and trade, others on more daring (and sometimes less lawful) ventures.
While most professions revolve around production and trade, even those come with their own quirks, challenges, and advantages. You’ll start with a modest set of products or activities, but as your enterprise flourishes, your options will expand, unlocking new ways to influence the world around you.
Whatever path you choose, your profession will shape your early strategy and open doors to new possibilities. The wealth it will earn you is not just coins in your pocket - it is your key to progress that allows you to upgrade your business, expand your residence, construct new buildings, and ultimately climb the social ladder.
In this dev diary, we’ll highlight a selection of professions available at the start of the game - and give you a glimpse into how they will allow your dynasty to rise and secure your place in history.
Stone Mason - working with stone, the initial items that can be crafted include sanding blocks, grindstones, and spinning tops. Stone Masons can also improve different roads and buildings to preserve the infrastructure’s integrity for a short period of time.
Joiner - as a woodworker, the joiner crafts wooden nails, handles, walking sticks, and bows. The Joiner can also improve your carts to slow down their degradation, meaning more use and less repairs for your cart.
Tailor - weaving beautiful fabrics, the Tailor creates warm socks, woollen cloaks, and cart covers. The Tailor is also adept at gathering information by chatting to chosen citizens, which can lead to more evidence against your foes to be collected.
Perfumer - aside from gathering flowers for fragrances, the perfumer makes salves and potions for your benefit. Beautiful scents created by the Perfumer can also increase the attractiveness of various buildings, tempting more customers to make purchases from the affected buildings' storefronts.
Alchemist - harnessing herbs, you can create potions, paint, and bombs. Alchemists can also improve the hygiene of various buildings by getting rid of pests, which will prevent illnesses and improve the quality of life for various citizens and workers.
Preacher - the initial items that the preacher can make are paper, poems, and parchment to help you increase your skills. Additionally, the Preacher can hold masses and grant absolution, earning some extra income.
Innkeeper - cooking up meals to replenish energy, and selling beverages to keep visitors pleased. The Innkeeper can also create a hearty and loose atmosphere to collect evidence, which makes gossiping at the inn inevitable.
The choices for professions will be expanded upon further - we will talk about other professions such as the Thief or the Moneylender in future dev diaries, so stay tuned for more! We also have other professions in mind for the future, so we hope you keep an eye out for more information down the road.
Your Business
So, you’ve picked your profession - what now? As a business owner, you need to sell items and ideally, turn a profit. In order to have items to sell, you can assign your workers to produce various goods. You can hire workers and assign them to produce various goods or work on certain tasks - for example, as a Smith, you can send out your employees to improve other buildings’ protection against burglars.
You can hire more workers to maximise your business's production of goods
Aside from managing your workers in your business, it is also vital to manage your business building’s integrity, as well as its improvements. Improvements to your businesses allow you to hire more workers, produce different and more profitable goods or entrust your employees with more difficult tasks.
Moreover, improvements can ease the production processes in your business by increasing storage capacity, improving customer appeal, and more. Keep in mind that it takes time to build an improvement for your business, so better get to it when you can reap its benefits! And keep your business in good repair - low building integrity will increase the risk of accidents and greatly diminish your building’s attractiveness to potential customers.
The Perfumer's workshop, at its starting point, without any improvements
The Perfumer's workshop with all of its improvements
Items that you produce in your workshop can be sold either in your business' storefront, or you can pack them onto your cart and send them to the marketplace. Selling them on the marketplace is faster, but selling them in your storefront can be better for your cart’s integrity. Depending on your business' distance from the marketplace, it may take some time for your cart to arrive, and outside the safety of the city walls, robbers might just wait for your cart to roll by. So plan your trips wisely and make sure every journey is worth the time and risk!
Your cart can deteriorate in terms of integrity over time - so make sure you repair it to keep your cart in tip-top shape! When you have enough money, you can purchase improved carts from the Marketplace and enjoy various perks, such as more slots for different items, better cart integrity, and a bit more speed, too!
You can use the Cart Management menu to track where your carts are headed.
Politics and Your Standing
Your medieval world takes shape based on the politicians in power - will you join them? Or will you vote against them?
A peek at the politics tree currently. This is still work in progress, so there may be more positions added in the future!
To make your voice heard in the City Council, you’ll need to step into the world of politics - but before you can do so, you must qualify for full citizenship and apply for it at the Town Hall. Once you’ve secured citizenship, your climb towards political power can begin.
Your rise starts humbly: At first, you can only apply for entry-level positions such as Town Servant, Night Watchman, or Spy. From there, advancement is gradual: you can only apply for an office one level higher than your current position. So, if you aim for a level 4 office, you’ll need to hold a level 3 position first – no skipping ahead.
You'll need to be ambitious to reach the top. Those in higher positions hold the power to appoint you, so earning their favour is essential. You can improve your standing by using special items from the Marketplace, targeting politicians by gender or chamber or even by personal preferences, or you can hone your rhetoric skills to shine during elections.
Of course, there are less honourable paths. You might choose to blacken a rival’s name, curse them, or bribe your way forward. Politics in The Guild - Europa 1410 is as much about strategy as it is about morality - and these choices lead us perfectly into the next section: the actions you can take in your medieval world.
What Actions Await You?
In The Guild - Europa 1410, actions represent everything you can do beyond producing goods. From finding a spouse and applying for office to bribing rivals or buying absolution at the church, there are countless ways to influence your world and advance your ambitions.
Most actions come with costs and requirements, so your options will be limited early on. You might need to upgrade your residence before you can blackmail opponents or train specific skills, and some actions only become available as the city expands and new buildings appear. Holding certain offices will also unlock unique opportunities to exert your influence.
Ultimately, the choice is yours: invest resources into improving your residence to access powerful actions, train your skills for long-term advantages, focus on building your business to generate wealth quickly, or dive into politics as soon as possible. There’s no single “right” strategy, but the decisions you make early on will have lasting consequences far into the late game.
Community Gameplay Tests
Would you like to help shape The Guild - Europa 1410? We are excited to announce that The Guild - Europa 1410 is reaching a major milestone: our first Closed Gameplay Tests are coming soon! This is your chance to get an early look at the game and help us make it the best The Guild game ever!
Read more here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/2977260/discussions/0/688617061539144775/
We can’t wait to show the game to a wider audience and hear your thoughts!
That’s all for today’s dev diary. Thank you for reading through it! For our next one, we’ll be talking about how crimes and punishment will work in your medieval world. What would you like to learn more about: laws, crime, punishments, or trials?