The Guild 2 Guide, Part 4: The Patron
This is part 4 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part three (the craftsman guide), if you feel like it.
Welcome to the second class guide for The Guild 2: Pirates of the European Seas! In this post, we’ll be discussing the patron class — (at least half of) the backbone of the Guild 2 economy.
Patrons are “fun-loving people with a penchant for good beer and wine”, or so the game says. What they really are is an excellent support class for pretty much any other, as they come with multiple benefits, including some of the raw materials all the crafting classes use. One thing patrons are not, however: they are not huge money makers.
General Background
Patrons, as mentioned above, are primarily a support class. Craftsmen and scholars, in particular, would do well to marry a patron as soon as possible, and build or buy a croft in order to get that leather coming in. On top of that, patrons also have the ability to run public houses, which allow you a few extra social interactions that help when courting spouses or mistresses, as well as producing Mead, the drink of the gods, which helps your controlled characters heal faster than any other method.
Patrons also produce various cheap-to-medium priced sellables, which tend to be quite popular when placed in a public house’s sell slots, similarly to how scholars can make money from hosts and rosaries. Unlike the scholars, however, there is only one “hot” time for public house activity, around 0:00 game time, compared to the two times per day that a sermon can be ordered (but more on the scholars in their own guide).
The Farm
Unlike pretty much any other raw material extraction industry, you cannot just buy a farm and expect it to work on its own. Instead, to run a farm properly, one must also purchase fields and/or corrals, and seed them with the raw material you wish to extract. There are four of these, two that come from fields (wheat and sugar beets) and two from corrals (cattle and sheep). Thus, you need exactly two fields and two corrals to allow your farm to produce anything in its repertoire.
As I mentioned before, after buying/building the farm and fields/corrals, the latter must also be seeded (unless you purchased them pre-seeded). Don’t worry, it’s a simple operation. Once the farm exists, your patron character and the farm employees gain a couple of new building (green) measures: Animal Husbandry, and Sow Crops (don’t be confused by the mention of barley in the description for the latter — barley no longer exists in the game (it was removed in version 1.3 or 1.4, if memory serves), but you don’t need it, either). All you need to do is click the appropriate measure, then on a field or corral (as appropriate), and decide what you’d like to plant or breed there. There is absolutely no advantage to having two corrals of cattle or two fields of sugar beets (unless you have two farms, obviously), and they never run out (unless you destroy the field).
After you’ve got those, production is pretty simple. Let’s say I was producing leather: I’d have my workers gather cattle, then once I had a few in storage, tell them to make leather. Just like any other industry, really.
The Bake Shop
Bakery is about on par with the weaving mill in terms of cash output. In particular, when you get to the pastry shop (tier 3), you will be able to make wheat rolls, which seem to sell very well in large towns. On top of that, however, bakers can also make Cakes, which are among the two most excellent artifacts for increasing standings with other dynasties (the other being poems). If you have a farm to bring in raw materials from, a baker is a good choice to expand your range of trade goods — but an even better choice is…
The Public House
…or, rather, the Inn (tier 3). Inns make Mead to heal you, Drunkard Brew to make you immune to insults, kidnapping, and thrashing, and they are also the home of the “Dance Together”, “Bathe Together”, and “Sweet Talk” measures, which will prove very useful in courtship since they have separate cooldown times from the other social measures you can inflict on your victim intended spouse. Using these measures pretty much guarantees you can achieve marriage in the first round, meaning having a baby in the first round, meaning your dynasty’s future can be secured sooner, rather than later.
Of course, you can also perform these actions without owning the inn, but the AIs are pretty slow about upgrading to the highest tier, and maybe you’re courting someone who would greatly appreciate being sweet-talked (a scholar, perhaps?) but cannot do it because you don’t have that option available to you…
Aside from that, selling grain porridges, weak beers, wheat beers, and/or roast beef from an inn can be quite lucrative over time. The cheaper foods, in particular, tend to always sell well, and 100 grain porridges sold in a day means 3200 cash at the cost of just 25 bags of wheat (350 cash at base price).
The Fisher Shack
This one’s much less likely to be useful to anyone, primarily because you need to have a sea-side map to build one. However, if you do have one such map on your hands, fishing can be a boost to your income. Both fried herring and smoked salmon, the first-tier goods you can make, tend to sell well in even the smallest towns, and the sell price for fried herring in particular tends to keep above base price even with relatively large numbers already on the market.
The method for fishing is also interesting since this may be your first encounter with ships: if you look at your fishery’s production screen, you will see three tabs instead of the usual two: transport, ships and character. The ships tab lets you buy a new fishing boat if you lose your original one. Fishing boats are pretty simple: the only thing they can do is fish, so find a school of herring or salmon and, with the fishing boat selected, right-click it to get the boat going. The boat will automatically deliver the catch when it’s full, and… that’s about it, actually.
The rest of fishery production works the same as any other workshop. Mussels, in particular, are caught from a Mussel Bed by workers rather than by the fishing boat (which would be rather confusing if you’d never run any other kind of workshop, I imagine).
Class synergies
The patrons are pretty self-contained in that they can produce pretty much everything they use. Because of this, they can be considered a very good potential choice for a single-class challenge. On top of that, the fact they can produce leather means they will synergize well with craftsmen and scholars, both of whom require leather to produce various goods.
The third tier fishery (called a smokehouse) also provides a little synergy with both craftsmen and scholars by requiring perfume (made by scholars) and gold and precious stones (made by craftsmen) for the most expensive trade goods. However, the requisite amounts of cross-class goods is relatively low, so you may be able to satisfy the demand just from the market.
On the other hand, rogues are a poor synergy for patrons from the point of view that neither produces anything the other wants. Given how useful a rogue in the family can be, however, it would still be a good choice to have one, if only for waylaying the competition’s carts (and/or looting their ships). Not to mention the extra possibility for money-making by posting pickpockets right outside your inn.
That’s all I know about the patron, I hope it serves you well! Meet me again next time, when we discuss the rogue class!
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[...] That’s it for the craftsman. Join me again next time for the patron guide! [...]
I’m loving your guide and am really looking forward to the next part. I feel like I’m pretty lost, though I am slowly getting better.
@Phileosophos: Thanks! The next part is probably going to be arriving today, and the scholar guide will soon follow. I do need a bit of feedback on what should follow after the class guides. Currently on the board: use of thugs and dealing with rival dynasties. Any other ideas?
[...] Part 5: The Rogue This is part 5 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part four (the patron guide), if you feel like [...]
Yeah, actually, I have several big unknowns with the game with which I’m having trouble. First, various contracts are announced from time to time but I haven’t been able to complete one.
Last night while I was playing there was a contract offered for three barrels of “Alderman’s Brew”. I eventually figured out that I could take my patron to the guild house and buy the instructions for making it, but I could only make one barrel of it, and even then when I took it back to the guild house I couldn’t find any way to complete it. I’ve seen contracts for poisoned daggers and various other items as well, but I can’t figure out how to complete any of them.
Second, every game I’ve played so far gets into this weird situation where none of my children can go to school. I get the notice that they’re old enough to start, and I click the button to pay the 500 gold to send them, but then I immediately get a notification about how there’s no valid path to their destination and their schooling has been interrupted. Once that happens, NO child can go to school, which really messes things up.
Third, I’d love to know how to automate buildings. In one game, for example, I had a top-level farm that was producing lots of beef for sale at the local markets. But I couldn’t find any way to automate it properly. I could get it to produce nothing but beef, but it would never sell it at the market; it would just put it up for sale at the farm itself, which never generated any revenue. If there’s any way to automate buildings with deliveries/sales, I’d love to know.
Fourth, I can’t seem to figure out how to use rogues properly. I can’t figure out how to burgle buildings, I can’t seem to attack a building without every guard in the whole city showing up and killing me instantly–which sure doesn’t happen when others attack my buildings–and I can’t figure out how to rob somebody or pickpocket somebody. I’m also more than a bit confused why rogues I hire can do so many more things than rogues in my dynasty that I’ve added to my group. I had one of my characters marry a rogue, for example, and added her to the group as one of the three characters I can control directly, but she couldn’t do hardly any of the things the rogues I hired off the street could do.
Fifth, I don’t get how to attach my dynasty characters to a building. When I start a game with a new character and build a building, he’s always available as a worker at that building until he dies. But none of the other two characters I can directly control are attached to any building to serve as workers there, nor can I figure out how to attach them. Do they have to build the building for that to work? Or is that something only for the first character? I don’t get it.
I realize that’s a lot of stuff, but then you did ask
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
@Phileosophos Okay, good, let’s look at all of those in turn:
You cannot have more than one controllable character own a workshop, but you can sort of bug your way into getting some useful work by setting the current owner to a less interruptible job (like “Serve Guests”; production jobs don’t work, sadly) and then setting a new owner. This works particularly well, for instance, for a family of scholars with a hospital — two of them can treat patients, leaving the third and the building employees available for making bandages and such.
As far as constructing buildings — they are *never* tied to a particular character until they have been built. Once that happens, the game looks at your controllable characters and picks the first one it finds who can work in that building, and sets them as the owner.
I’m not sure whether to toss this last explanation into the “General Facts” part of the guide or keep it until part 7.
Edited to add formatting. WordPress is mean (or more likely, the theme I’m using is. Too lazy to find a new one, though)!
Ah, that’s all very interesting stuff. I will make notes of all of it. This game is so much deeper than I had thought! A couple of quick follow-ups come to mind nevertheless.
First, regarding automation, I’m baffled. In the current game I’m playing, I own a bakery that I’m using to learn automation. I set it to AI controlled and accepted all the default options. As near as I can tell, it never sells anything on the market. In fact, what it does is bizarre: it keeps sending its carts full of produced goods to my farm and dumping them into its inventory!
It’s set to sell anywhere on the map, and it’s set to automate everything–production, transportation, the whole shebang. But instead of selling anything to make money, it’s dumping all its produced goods into my farm’s storage slots. And the kicker is that the bakery has plenty of storage room in its own slots! I don’t get this at all.
And second, regarding the rogue-characters thing, isn’t it more than a bit odd that I can hire a level one rogue to work at my house, and he can do more stuff than my level seven rogue controllable character? I guess I’ll go try to buy a thieves guild before she dies and see if her abilities suddenly appear. That just seems lame to me.
@Phileosophos As I said, automation needs to be covered better — there are a lot of options in there! — and you’ve run into an automation bug: the workshop AI sees that the best price for your used raw materials is at the farm, so it treats the farm like a market: it goes there, “sells” the finished goods, and “buys” raw materials. For its calculations, it assumes that raw materials from the farm (which you own!) are bought at base price (rather than zero), meaning that if the market buy price ever goes below the base price, it will buy from market as normal… but that pretty much never happens. Automation AI works best with a very strict set of constraints — but even then, it’s worse than just doing everything manually.
As for characters, well… the same thing happens with patrons, only slightly less obviously: until they own a farm, they cannot do animal husbandry or sow fields. Once they have a farm, they can do those things.
Thugs hired from the house, however, are a very special case in that they can do things no character can ever do (such as the two sabotage (bomb and firebomb) measures). These are special measures that are only available to thugs, and it doesn’t matter what level they are[1]. I suspect there’s a reason for this, though I’ve no idea what that reason is.
[1] — Come to think of it, I’ve never heard of any measures that require a character or employee to be of a certain level.
Ah, that makes “sense” out of it! So I guess when the bakery “sells” its materials to the farm, it’s really just dumping them in inventory, right? It’s not actually transferring money or something, right?
Also, if I understand you correctly, then, there’s no cross-building planning in the AI, right? In other words, it’s not like the bakery notifies the farm that it needs wheat so the farm can produce it. It’s more than the bakery needs wheat, sees that the farm has it “for sale”, and sends out a cart with some baked goods to deposit in exchange. Is that right?
I was already convinced that the AI was horrible at what it did. It’s barely competent, but it does still seem to turn a very inefficient profit of a sort. I was making money hand over fist with the trifecta of top-level farm, inn, and bakery, but when I handed it all over to the AI my earnings dropped by at least 70%.
@Phileosophos: Precisely! Though, to be fair, it if were transferring money, it would be going from you to you, so how would you tell the difference?
Also, farms you don’t own won’t accept “sales”, which is likely why the AI doesn’t fuck up as much there.
It’s true, the auto-management AI is horrible, which is doubly a shame because the AI dynasties use the same management for their workshops — making the only successful AIs the ones using rogue characters. If you’re at a point in the game where making money is important to you (and considering the cost of the highest titles, that would be pretty much the whole game), you’re better off keeping to a manageable number of workshops and micromanaging the hell out of them.
One thing I’ve done in the past has been to set auto-management for trading only, which adds an interesting behaviour: if you manually put something in an auto-managed building’s cart, the management AI will go off to the market and sell it, no matter how bad the sell price it will obtain. On the other hand, I’ve also found myself bumping heads with the AI on this from time to time, and it doesn’t really seem worth the cost of auto-management just for that.
The best compromise I’ve found so far is to keep a handcart (later an oxcart) in the market, oxcarts from each workshop next to the raw material producing buildings, and carts next to the workshops themselves, allowing me to use “Unload and return” on everything. This has highlighted a minor interface bug: that buildings sometimes stop highlighting, disabling the automatic action (which for carts is the “auto-unload” measure). Luckily, it’s easily worked around: move the mouse to the measures bar and everything starts highlighting again.
Thanks so much for all the help! I just finished my first game tonight, as I wrote in my blog (the URL is http://phileosophos.com/wordpress/?p=1282 if you’d like to read it). I ran into one really annoying problem: the last enemy guild member was always “untouchable”, so I couldn’t kill him, kidnap him, or pretty much anything. I had to keep killing all his heirs and ultimately wait for him to die. Do you have any advice for handling an “untouchable” enemy? And how do you become “untouchable” in the first place? I thought it was by being the sovereign of a town, but one of my characters somehow got kidnapped while she was sovereign.
@Phileosophos: It’s been my pleasure entirely!
Will be off to read your post asap, but first:
Untouchable seems a bit like the “venerability” privilege the judges get — except that one only makes them immune to insults, threats, blackmail, and duels.
The first thing I thought of is there is no fighting inside buildings. Or else, the character may have been drinking Drunkard’s Brew all the time, which should have this effect. There may also be a title privilege that makes them untouchable, but I somehow doubt it. One further possibility is if the character was king — I think kings are untouchable, but I make no guarantees since I haven’t had a king yet. Note that I’m not talking about the sovereign position — I’m speaking about the top position in an Imperial City (of which there can only be one on a map).
Unfortunately, not having seen “untouchable” yet, I can’t say anything definite. Either way, it sounds like you fixed him good anyway in likely the only possible way.
Wow. I thought you’d know for sure. He was “untouchable” for most of the game. I was never able to figure out why. For what it’s worth, I was proceeding against him along multiple lines by the end of the game. I had rogues spying on him, amassing tons of evidence, and I was finally able to file charges just before the game ended (he was previously immune to prosecution). But right after I filed charges, I had another idea: I had my rogue insult him, which prompted him to challenge her to a duel.
The duel was scheduled for 5:00 a.m. of the last day of the game, whereas his trial was scheduled for 9:00 a.m. I figured one or the other would get him. I was surprised that my rogue performed so poorly in the duel. She got shot three times and barely survived, whereas she wasn’t able to land a single hit on the old guy. But then the game just up and ended right after the duel.
I really don’t understand what happened. All I can figure is that the enemy patriarch finally dropped dead. He was 90+ by that point, so I guess it makes sense.
Bahaha! That’s hilarious, flawlessly winning a duel and promptly dropping dead from old age.
Anyway thanks to Narc, you answered quite a few questions I had as well.