Patch Notes for Version EA 0.5.2 - July 4, 2018
Steam version number: 2903154
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 Steam library, then Properties - LOCAL FILES - REVIEW FILES TO ERROR
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: Google Form
Please note: We do not collect any data other than your feedback - it remains completely anonymous. This poll ends on July 15, 2018