Steam version number: 2865486
New Feature
- The tall buildings and lush vegetation often obscure characters, often causing players to lose focus on important events in the city. In addition, one has to constantly rotate the camera to keep the tracked character in view. To solve this problem, we have added a feature that makes the vegetation and buildings transparent if the object is close to the camera. There are a few buildings that hide earlier than they should, but most of them work very well.
- We've implemented a highlight shader which highlights hovered characters or buildings. This feature should make it easier for you to see whether an object can be interacted with or not.
- Now, if you use actions that require a character or building as a target, then valid targets turn green and invalid targets turn red when hovered. This makes your search for a valid target much more comfortable. In future patches we will also revise the feedback texts that are displayed if you have a valid or invalid target under the mouse pointer. Please note that we still need to revise some measures so that the targets are all correctly colored and the correct feedback text is displayed. We will fix that in a later patch.
- One problem area that both we ourselves have noticed and which was also present in your feedback is that it is sometimes difficult to determine what/who is currently selected. As a first step, we have now implemented that when you select a character or building, a white outline is drawn around the selected object. To be consistent we removed the green highlight for selected buildings. The farther the camera is from the target, the larger the outline appears. That should also make it easier to determine at long distances what is actually selected. The outline is only drawn over visible objects, which can sometimes seem strange in trees, but otherwise fits better into the picture. If you deem the behavior with trees as very negative, we already have some ideas how we could solve that. Please let us know.
- If your avatar or one of your employees has no task, then it has often been difficult to notice that. Therefore, we have a new feature built in: on the right edge of the screen you will find the button "show idle characters". If it is grayed out, then you do not have to act. However, if this is not the case and a number is displayed next to the button, then you know that one or more of your characters are currently without a task. If you click the button, you will gradually be able to call all these characters and assign them a new task. In order to prevent the button from lighting up whenever, for example, a worker has just run out of raw materials and the new raw materials have not yet arrived at the business, we have implemented a delay until a character is listed as "idle".
- When you select a building, you will see the name of the building and the owner's coat of arms. If the building is in your possession, then additional portraits of all characters in the building are displayed. You can also directly select the individual characters by clicking on their portrait. The selected character then shows a white outline (consistent with the selected characters and buildings). This should make it much easier for you to get an overview of family members and employees. One more tip: To see which characters are in an opponent's building, you have to spy on it.
Fixes
- Fixed several crashes caused by using startup parameters in Steam.
- The game could crash while you are constructing a building, if certain decoration objects were present on the ground. This should not happen anymore.
- Under certain circumstances, the folder for save games wasn't created during the installation of the game. This could either lead to a crash or the game not being saved. From now on, the folder for save games should always be created automatically.
- We have resolved several issues related to saving and loading saved games. Among other things, the saving process should no longer lead to a crash. Important: The saving process may take a while. In this case, please do not click with the mouse, otherwise it may happen that Windows closes the program because it thinks it is frozen. We are already looking at this and hope to find a solution soon.
- Several memory leaks have been fixed, which has a positive impact on the performance especially later in the game. We will continue to optimize this.
- If you have more than 40 saved games, the save window is now displayed correctly.
- The saving window is not shown behind the list of save games anymore.
- It could happen that the characters on bridges completely disappear, this should be fixed now.
- If you follow a character with the RTS camera over a bridge, the camera does not move under the bridge anymore.
- The selection system has been revised: Especially if you had changed the angle of the camera, often characters or buildings were selected behind the object, which you actually wanted to select. In general, the selection behavior should now be much more precise and faster.
- Tooltips that partially or completely cover buttons should no longer prevent clicking on underlying buttons.
- Tooltips of the environment map and for changing the camera mode are no longer below the according buttons.
- The camera icon on the map now also moves correctly in "Free Camera" mode.
- If you move the mouse cursor over a character portrait, the camera does not automatically center this character.
- You can now select transporters again via the transporter window. You can now also select the building if you click on the building name in the same window.
- The music when playing as a rogue is now played correctly.
- All options of the warehouse are available again: hire and fire transporters, statistics, sell and destroy building and purchase building upgrades.
Art
- The following buildings and walls have been optimized and 3 additional LOD levels have been added. The performance should be a lot better than before, especially when you are looking over the city in a flat camera angle:
- all 4 Houses
- all 8 Citizen Houses
- all 5 Mansions
- Windmill
- Farm level 1 to 3
- Bakery level 1 to 3
- Butcher
- Tavern level 1 to 3
- Crude Craftsman's Hut
- Smithy level 3
- Stonemasonshop level 1 to 3
- Carpentershop level 1 to 3
- Tailorshop level 1 to 3
- Thieves' den level 1 to 3
- City Church
- City Walls
- City Gates
- To make the differentiation of building types easier, we will successively change the roof textures of all buildings: houses: orange shingles, businesses: bluish shingles, public buildings: grayish shingles.
Known issues
- Some players have reported that they can not start the game anymore. We have an idea of why it might be and will look at it.
- The building construction mode is unfortunately not yet optimal: under certain circumstances, a building is erected at a location other than selected.
- Hiding buildings and vegetation, when the camera is close to the object, currently has the unwanted effect that mountains are hidden and you can see the unprocessed level underneath. We will gradually revise the maps, so you will not have this effect anymore.
Important Message
After installing the latest patch, your old saved games will possibly no longer be shown in the menu due to the reason that the game recognizes them as "incompatible". If you have problems with loading or saving, then we recommend deleting all files from the folder named "Games", where all of your saved games are stored.
It is possible that some of the issues that you encounter but other players not, are causes by missing or corrupt files. In this case it may help if you do the following: right click "The Guild 3" in your Steam library and then Properties - LOCAL FILES - VERIFY INTEGRITY OF GAME FILES
What we plan to do for the next patch...
- For certain titles you will not only need XP but also have to pay money.
- We will bring a small update to the economy: Several bug fixes should ensure that the AI management of businesses produces a wider range of products, thus better serving the market. Additionally we will re-work how the AI will handle working places which are unlocked via building upgrades and how the AI restaffs after a worker died.
- As announced, we want to implement visible recognition and differentiation of dynasty characters, employees and buildings using clothing colors and coats of arms on buildings.
- We will also add that employees look different depending on their profession. We will have changed only some of the characters but we will update more in the future.
- Among other things, we will fix the error that you can still use employees with the wrong profession as a worker in another business.
- Currently, the lifespan of characters is very similar. Our goal is that life spans are significantly different. The natural life expectancy of dynasty members should then be between 55 and 89 years, while non-dynasty characters will have a natural life expectancy between 40 and 89 (later on, diseases, toxins, injuries and items like the Elixir of Dr. Faustus will affect natural life expectancy)
- In general, we will look at and fix issues related to the aging and dying (of age) of characters.
A brief outlook...
- The next major priorities are to correct the error-prone pathfinding and to further improve performance. We will also continue to make further changes to the character controls and feedback.
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Your feedback counts!
If you can spare some time for the following little survey regarding the changes in patch EA 0.5.1 you would help us a lot: Google Form
Please note: we have no intents of collecting data other than your feedback - you remain completely anonymous. This survey ends on July 1st, 2018.