Acquiring Guilds

**Callawyn** · March 17, 2007, 08:10 PM

Its incredibly difficult to acquire any guilds at all in TLR. You can't add them to a build queue, need to have 6k in cash available at the beginning of your turn. Problem is, with the greatly reduced income and greatly increased build cost for city structures, your build queues is pretty much perpetually stalled. This happens in vanilla for a short period of time at the beginning of the game, but once you get your economy rolling, your build queue is no longer stalled and you can turn enough of a profit to afford the guilds (which cost 1, 2 and 3k respectively). In TLR, no matter how ruthlessly you press your economy forward, you never get caught up with the build queue. The only way to avoid having your build queue stalled is to stop building entirely. In order to get a guild paid for, you have to clear all the build queues in every city you have.

**tornnight** · March 17, 2007, 08:49 PM

I'm not sure what a good solution would be.

Make the guilds cheap may be the only way. Hmm. Any ideas?

**Callawyn** · March 17, 2007, 11:52 PM

Would it be possible to charge the player say 100 Florins to accept, then hit them with the remaining 5900 after accepting? Would only need 100 in treasury to accept, then go into debt. You'd pay off the balance next turn. Still be paying the 6k for the guild, but you'd allow players to go into debt to do it. Since the player has a choice whether to accept or not, would work pretty well if it can be done.

**tornnight** · March 18, 2007, 08:50 AM

Nope can't do something like that. It's hardcoded.

**Conte Martinengo** · March 18, 2007, 09:50 PM

I think guild cost is far too high in the long road economy, because the offer to build a guild house is supposed to be a reward for the players gameplay from a given guildhouse, so what kind of reward is the offer to build that we can never afford?
I think they should be very cheap. Done by simply modifying the constuction costs in the EDB.
This could be ok only if the ai balance is offset to compensate for the fact that the player is getting the advantage of access to the resources the guild offer

**Averroës** · March 19, 2007, 07:03 AM

What I usually do when a guild offer comes is check my building queues. It's often possible to cancel a build that has just started and thus have enough cash to accept the guild. I only cancel those builds which are in their first turn, not ones which are already partially done. If nothing is available to cancel, you can still click "yes" even though you don't have the money. This usually causes the offer to be made again next turn, so you'll be able to cancel any upcoming builds and thus add the income from two turns together.

**tornnight** · March 19, 2007, 06:13 PM

I've decided to halve the costs to acquire the guilds. This will be part of the next release.

**Callawyn** · March 20, 2007, 02:11 AM

Problem with that, Averroes, is that as soon as you cancel one build, the game will automatically pay for something else. Considering the number of buildings that cost 3-5k, with guild cost 6k, you'd have to clear a lot of build queues in order to not pay for some buildings when cancelling others.

Tornnight: Would help if the basic guild were 2500, could then do as Averroes suggests, since you almost never need to pay for a building that costs less than 3k.

**Callawyn** · March 23, 2007, 10:19 PM

2k, 4k, 6k for price progression of guilds would allow the player to be able to manipulate build queues to get a guild paid for even with badly stalled build queue, since so many buildings cost 3k, 5k, 7k.

Cheaper than I'm sure you'd like, but considering the game forces you to pay for guilds immediately they're offered, at the point in the turn when you're certain to have no money at all if your build queue is stalled (which, in TLR is likely the first couple hundred turns), I don't see a better option.

**infernocanuck** · March 28, 2007, 01:33 AM

Mentioning Guilds, I have recently understood that there is a "normalizing" feature in the game, where after turn 50, all guilds get -1 " guild points" every turn. Since accumulating "points" to get many guilds are depenendant on building certain buildings, I'm wondering if TLR has been balanced properly to factor in increased build times with the guild point normalization system.

Gah, it's late. I hope that made sense.

**Callawyn** · March 28, 2007, 06:11 AM

Good point, after turn 25 there's a -1 point per settlement per guild type. If the number of guild points you get per building upgrade is the same in TLR as vanilla, with much increased completion times for buildings, this definitely increases the difficulty of attracting guilds that are dependent on building construction rather than agent/unit construction. Mason's guild, which is entirely dependent on building construction will be most affected.