Ramblings of Narc

Welcome to what I’m hoping will be a useful and definitive guide to the world of The Guild 2, and its expansion, Pirates of the European Seas!

Foreword and Game History

Way back in the Internet Dark Ages of 2002, a small German developer studio called 4HEAD Studios came to JoWood Productions and pitched a game called Europa 1400: The Guild. The game was revolutionary for its time and was quite fun to play, however it sold poorly, presumably because it was also buggy and painful to learn. Nonetheless, it was good enough to spawn a sequel: The Guild 2, published in 2006.

In both games’ cases, they started out full of bugs and half-finished features, and in both games’ cases, the bugs were patched and the features improved. Unfortunately, the early bugs also led to poor sales and relative obscurity of the games in the gaming community. Until 2010.

In June 2010, JoWood exposed The Guild 2 and its first expansion, Pirates of the European Seas, to users of Valve’s Steam platform, at very reasonable prices. This quickly led to an influx of new players, most of who were discovering the game for the first time and finding it quite fun. With most of the earlier bugs fixed, and in spite of a four-year-old platform, Steam users enjoyed it at first — and then came the questions.

You see, in all of TG2′s history, nobody seems to have written a comprehensive guide to the game. The ingame tutorial, though sufficiently broad to give a good start, barely scratches the surface of the underlying game. And the manual… well, people don’t read manuals, do they?

And so we come to this: an attempt at producing and providing to the community a comprehensive guide to The Guild 2. This guide will be focusing on the Pirates of the European Seas expansion because it is assumed more people will play it than the original. Let’s get started, then, shall we?

In the beginning: The Tutorial

I would strongly recommend starting out with the tutorials, which will give you a good idea of how to use the game’s interface, and get started in explaining the game to you. It will also highlight some of the bugs that may have arisen from an imperfect patching process (if you try to patch manually, that is) — for instance, if the game tells you to buy a business but you’re unable to do so. The tutorials are found on the main menu in Single Player:

Tutorial:

From here, just pick a tutorial (if you’re just starting out, only the first is available), and click Start:

After the Tutorial

I’m going to assume you’ve gone through the whole thing and found it reasonably interesting (or, at least, not impossible). In any other game, at this point you’d start the campaign, which would show you more of the game and give you targets to aim for… well, we’re not gonna do that. Let’s instead start a new game:

Click that, and you get to the game setup screen:

From here, you can pick a map from the selection box at the top-left (I’m going to use the first map, “The Sheriff of Nottingham”), pick a hometown by clicking on the map:

(I clicked on Nottingham, and you can see the Hometown changed from “Random” in the previous screenshot), pick a game mode… hold on, let me explain the game modes:

• Dynasty Mode is your basic open-ended game mode. There is no way to win, only ways to lose (by having your dynasty^[1] wiped out or left penniless, basically). We’ll be playing this one, but I’ll go over the others, too.
• Extinction introduces a win condition: be the last dynasty standing.
• Time limit — exactly what it says on the tin: the game ends at the time limit. The maximum is 10 rounds, which isn’t all that long, really.
• Mission — to be honest, I haven’t played this much yet. I assume it’s also exactly what it says on the tin: perform a certain mission in order to win the game.

Finally, you have a couple of other choices: the number of dynasties (including your own; I’m starting with just 2 because I’m lazy), and the difficulty, which needs to be explained a little bit.

The manual says: “The general level of difficulty means that you make the game more difficult for yourself, but not for the computer dynasties. The level of difficulty for missions, on the other hand, also affects the computer dynasties.” What they really mean is, the level of difficulty really only determines your starting amount of money, whereas the AIs always get to start with the same amount, as well as a random industry building (we’ll be getting around to those, too). The mission difficulty, on the other hand, determines the win condition which must be met by anyone trying to win, whether that’s an AI or a human. We don’t really care about that, though — we have no mission.

So what we’ll do is set the difficulty to Easy to give us a nice 10,000 cash to start off. We’ll also pick a coat of arms from the selection at the bottom. I’m quite partial to the yellow one myself:

Whew! That was a lot of jibber-jabber for not having even started a game yet, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to pop off for a coffee or a snack. Well, go ahead, I’ll be right here when you get back. And when you’re ready, proceed to click the Start button:

Creating your First Character

This is the first of the two character creation screens, and arguably the only important one. Your choice here will determine how you play the first round or two of the game, as well as what your dynasty name will be. We’ll start with naming:

I’m not terribly imaginative, and don’t want to spend any time thinking of a good name for my first character (especially since he or she is going to die eventually anyway), so I go with “First” for a first name. The Last name, on the other hand, is very important, because it will remain with you for the rest of the game. It’s a good idea to get used to making your online handle the dynasty name, it helps the other human players in a multi-player game recognize you. This is why I pretty much always run the Narc dynasty. You’ll thank me later.

The next part is the class selection, and this is the part that determines your early gameplay:

As you learned in the tutorial (right?), there are four classes in the game: Patron, Crafts(wo)man, Scholar, and Rogue^[2]. The Rogue class is the most radically different of all four, and we’ll get around to explaining him in the per-class guides — for now, though, sticking to one of the other three will give you similar experiences. One of the easiest classes to start with is the Craftsman, so I’ll be picking that this time around, but I’ll be detailing the actual gameplay in the next post in this series.

Let’s also get Sex and Religion out of the way:

There isn’t really any difference between playing as a man or a woman, other than that the woman will be confined at home for a short extra period after making babies spending the night together with her husband.

Likewise, religion doesn’t matter much, except that you will tend to have greater favor^[3] with those of the same religion as you (a minor effect, but sometimes the difference between being voted Sovereign or getting kicked out of politics). It’s perfectly possible to change religion at only a minor cost, should you feel it necessary, so don’t worry about it too much.

Finally, the Zodiac sign and the Talents:

The Talents are much like skills in an RPG — they determine various attributes ranging from how long you will live to whether you’ll get a bargain when trading at the market. The Zodiac sign will just give you a bonus point to one of the talents (and you can use the right-click-and-hold trick to find out which one). So let’s get to explaining the talents, right?

Talents: live for over 100 years! Talk your way out of anything!

Here’s a quick overview of the talents, to get us started:

• Constitution — determines how long you’ll live, referred to in the game as “Life Points”. It also determines your hitpoints, and how many inventory slots you have. Almost always an excellent choice for your XP.
• Dexterity — determines how fast you move, whether you dodge while in combat, and also how good you are at pickpocketing and performing burglaries without being caught. It’s useful, but not as useful as Constitution or Rhetoric.
• Charisma — grants you a small favor bonus with everyone, as well as making you better at embracing, kissing, and courting spouses or lovers. I’d skip this to start with, since Rhetoric will help you in courting while also working in other areas.
• Martial Arts — determines the strength and accuracy of your attacks. A good choice if you intend to go around killing people, but otherwise a miss.
• Handicrafts — determines how quickly you work in a business. This talent is pretty much useless for a rogue, since their businesses work differently, and it’s not terribly useful for anyone who spends little time working in their businesses (preferring to go into politics, for instance)
• Stealth — determines how easily illegal acts can be performed and concealed. A must for rogues or anyone using underhanded methods to deal with competitors; a definite miss for upstanding citizens such as ourselves.
• Rhetoric — as previously mentioned, rhetoric helps in courting, specifically when using the “compliment” or “beguile” actions, but it also helps in insulting, threatening, political meetings, trials, and bribery. For such a widely useful talent, it gains the honor of being the second most important to upgrade for anyone going into politics or who might be in a trial (as prosecutor or defendant).
• Empathy — in theory, empathy is the anti-rhetoric, letting you “see through [it] in politics, trials, duels and bribes”. It also lets you see through stealth to gather evidence. In practice, it’s pretty much useless for a player character. You might want a couple of points in it if you’re failing at gathering evidence on a clearly malevolent competitor, but otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.
• Bargaining — this one should give you good deals at the market, such as a little extra money when selling goods, or a little less money paid to buy goods. In practice, the effect seems minor so it gets a miss, too.
• Arcane Knowledge — affects the duration of artifact effects, as well as cooldowns. I’m not sure if this also affects cooldowns for actions like goading workers or bribing, but even so, it’s a low-priority talent unless you’re a scholar with a Mages’ Guild.

So now that we have an idea of what each talent does, let’s see what this means for our starting build. I personally like to start with the maximum constitution, picking Aries for the zodiac sign (+1 Con) and putting all my starting XP into the same talent. This ensures a long enough life for my starting character to get stuff done before her inevitable demise, and she’ll most definitely need it. Starting a dynasty isn’t easy, you know.

I would also consider reducing the Constitution and adding some points in Rhetoric and Charisma, like so:

Or even without the Charisma bonus:

to help with the initial courting of the first spouse. Don’t worry too much about leftover XP, as you will keep it and be able to use it later, together with all the XP you’ll be gathering from playing the game.

I’m sticking with my initial build, though:

and with all that finally out of the way, let’s click Continue:

Which leads us to the appearance selection:

Word of advice: nobody really cares about it. Hit Random a few times until you’re happy with it, or play with it any other way, but either way, when you’re ready, hit Start game:

And find yourself in your new town, ready to go and have fun:

This is an excellent time to hit Escape, click Save Game, pick a name for your new savegame, and click the New saved game button:

You’ll note the savegame name box now has a 1 appended, and if you save again it’ll become 2, 3, etc., making it easy to keep many saves over a long game. It’s highly recommended that you do so, too — you never know when a bug will render your latest savegame unusable and you’ll have to jump back to an earlier one.

Now, take a breath! You’ve gotten through the character setup and only the game itself remains ahead of you — and this is a good point for me to take a break, too. So, I’ll meet you in the next part of the guide!

Footnotes

• ^[1] — a Dynasty is what you control: not just one person, but that person and all its family (but you can only control three of the family members at one time).
• ^[2] — be very careful when writing about this class (e.g. on a forum). It’s very common to typo or misspell rouge, which really means something completely different. You don’t want to be talking about the lipstick class, yes?
• ^[3] — favor is the quantification of how an AI player feels about your dynasty. If you have high favor with someone, they are more likely to vote for you, and less likely to try to rob, kidnap, or blackmail you.