Ramblings of Narc

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 it.

Okay, I admit, I lied yesterday when I said the rogue guide would be up then — to make up for it, the scholar guide will be forthcoming as soon as I finish this one. So, without further ado:

Welcome to the third class guide for The Guild II: Pirates of the European Seas! In this post we will be discussing the rogue class, which (among other things) features the titular pirate occupation, as well as a couple of other similarly underhanded business opportunities.

The rogue class has always been a good money-maker in G2, presumably to offset the theoretical risk of being brought to court and having your life (and possibly your dynasty) ended prematurely. However, given that it’s perfectly possible to offset that risk and “play it safe”, the rogue class has also gained a reputation for being somewhat unbalanced.

General Background

Full disclosure: I generally do not play this class, so it’s perfectly possible that when I do, I play very sub-optimally. Thus, your mileage may vary, and if it does, I’d very much like to hear from you about what I’m doing wrong!

With that said, my experience playing the rogue class is that it tends to be about as lucrative as a craftsman without a mine — which is pretty good.

Additionally, rogue buildings have the dubious distinction of not having any classical-style production, instead relying on workers being controlled individually with the building as just a central point of management. On the other hand, many rogue operations tend to be of the “set it and forget it” type, thus featuring much lower micromanagement requirements than any other class. But enough about the generics, let’s look at the buildings:

The Robbers’ Nest

This wouldn’t be my first choice to start with, but it’s the first of the three buildings available so let’s get on that. From recommendations I’ve read, the ideal place for a robber’s nest is just outside a town, where you can be protected from others’ nefarious activities by the town guards, and can almost always find useful prey nearby. However, most maps tend not to have enough space to allow you such a choice location, and the robber camp is really big compared to most buildings.

Unlike the other two rogue buildings, the robber camp actually has a use for storage space, because two of the activities you can pursue: waylaying carts and plundering buildings, will net you all or part of the goods being transported or stored, which will be transported back to the robber camp and will need to then go elsewhere. Mind you, you’re getting the goods for “free” (cost of wages only), so pretty much anything can be sold at the nearest market no matter what, but it still means you need a cart, and the first tier building in particular only allows handcarts.

The robbers’ nest also features more micromanagement than the other rogue buildings, in that you will need to watch your employees’ health (if you’re waylaying or plundering) and/or keep ordering activity to resume. Plus, you will have to keep selling all the crap your employees bring in because you have very few storage slots, which will be a pain if you’re far from town, even with three handcarts on constant “unload and return” orders.

On the other hand, if you get lucky and capture a shipment of high-value goods going from one town to another, you can make a lovely profit from that one haul alone. Good luck with that, though, most carts seem to be loaded with raw materials like wood and sugar beets.

Let’s look at the potential activities in turn:

Waylaying

Pros:

• Carts are sometimes full of yummy high-value goods
• Gain XP for each mercenary killed

Cons:

• High-value goods are rare — usually you get sugar beets and fat and the like
• Mercenaries are well-armed, so you will lose employees (or need to order them to heal often)
• Need storage space and carts to empty it

Protection Racket

Pros:

• Safe — you can demand protection money from just about any
  building and guards will not care

Cons:

• Safe — there’s not a lot of money in it.
• If the business owner refuses to pay, your worker will automatically plunder the building, potentially bringing the guards down on his head
• Slow — protection takes a long time (12 hours?), and you’re only paid on completion.
• No automation — when a protection cycle finishes, you will need to order a new one.

Plundering Buildings

Pros:

• Buildings are sometimes full of yummy high-value goods (more often than carts, for sure)
• Gain XP for killing town guards or bailiffs

Cons:

• Buildings also often contain raw materials, and you cannot select what to plunder
• Bailiffs are well-armed, so you will lose employees
• Need storage space and carts to empty it

The Smugglers’ Hole

A much more reasonable first “workshop”, the smugglers’ hole/thieves’ den is much more of a “set it and forget it” operation, if you don’t mind the low (but steady) income from pickpocketing. It doesn’t seem to be possible to get caught pickpocketing, which means you essentially have a free money machine. And, with three workers at the lowest tier, you can just goad once and pay bonus once and you’ll have your level 3 character to upgrade straight to the middle tier of the building, which brings with it the ability to kidnap people for ransom.

Word of advice: don’t be surprised if you have long periods of low income: if all the workers are all at work, and the politicians are at the town hall for court or politics, the only people left out in the open are the unemployed and the guards. If you wait a bit, though, the targets will come right out and into the hands of your waiting cut-purses.

Burglaries are somewhat more difficult (and micromanagement-intensive). You should have at least four employees before you start, and you should scout your target building before you do anything. Furthermore, the ideal time for a burglary is when nobody else is around — if the bailiffs get called, you’re pretty much screwed. Mines are particularly good burglary targets — I got about 1,500 per employee working on one in the first round my current guide game, with the mine initially selling for about 13,000. With that said, the chance of getting caught by the bailiffs is high enough that it’s not really worth it.

Kidnapping is even less more fun because you need to beat up the kidnap target first. And then, even if you do catch them alone on a road between towns, they still may not pay the ransom for a very, very long time. And if their dynasty is poor, as they usually are, the payoff will likely not be worth the amount of work put in.

The easiest way to play thieves is simply to set them to pickpocketing and forget about them. Go into politics or something. You’ll have continuous income and nothing to worry about. If you want more cash, once per round or so, you can rob the city mine and possibly the woodcutter’s hut, and then go right back to pickpocketing for the remainder of the day.

The Pirate Haven

Finally, we come to the third and last rogue building, the pirate haven/fortress, which is actually a combination fortress and brothel, more or less. The employees you hire for this “workshop” (all female!) can go out and, um… provide “salacious services” for passing menfolk. This works very much like pickpocketing, so I won’t dwell on it any further.

For the actual piracy part of the operation, you need to first buy a ship from the ships tab. You don’t really have much choice, the carrack is the only ship available. Once the pirate ship is built, it would be a good idea to hit “improve ship” and upgrade it as best you can. Don’t go overboard with the upgrades — it’s more useful to have a large crew (you’ll see why in a moment).

When you’re ready, start looking for targets and “plunder ship” to your heart’s content. Remember how I said you should prefer a large crew? Well, this is why — plundering will lose you some crew every time you do it. What you get from plundering will either be cash or cargo. When an enemy refuses to allow themselves to be boarded, you will bring your cannon into play (so it’s good to have those upgraded) and beat them into submission, much like beating up a rival dynasty member to rob them.

Now, this part is unconfirmed, but there’s no reason to believe the implementation is any different: I presume that, like the employees of a building, the crew of a ship are paid at the end of each round — which would make it very worthwhile to let your crew count go down as it gets later in the day. Beyond that, keep an eye on your available crew (too low and you won’t have enough to plunder with) and on your ship’s hit points (duh?). Plundering seems to range around 200-500 cash and each crew member takes 50 cash in upkeep (and you lose about 5 musket-armed crew in each plunder), which means 10 crew might plunder two ships and leave you with practically no wages to be paid and around 1000 cash richer. Repair costs are also reasonably low, making piracy a particularly good money-maker if you’re on a map with enough enemy ships to plunder.

As far as I can tell, a ship can only be plundered once per day (or thereabouts), so on a map with little ocean, you will have trouble doing anything after you’ve plundered the four ships the map has (they do regenerate sometimes, but rarely enough that it’s a bit of a pain to wait until that happens).

The pirate ship can also camouflage, which is a nice way of saying it cloaks, but the AIs don’t seem to care about not being able to see you.

You can also use the pirate ship to raid buildings (specifically, storehouses and other pirate nests), which works a lot like plundering the same building, but without a chance of getting caught and killed by the bailiffs (instead, you may be killed by towers). Unfortunately, so far, both of my attempts so far have failed, but I assume you would take part of the goods inside the building, if there were any goods in the building. AIs probably won’t have anything, though. May as well stick to plundering ships.

Oh, one other thing I should mention: your ladies also seem to be able to “distract guards”, which I assume is what it says on the tin — that it will keep bailiffs or city guards from catching and killing robbers or thieves.

Class synergies

The rogue synergizes well with a craftsman to make weapons and armor for employees, especially robbers (as long as you’re careful not to let them die too easily — when they die, their weapons and armor go with them!).

Aside from the above, however, the rogue does not need anything produced by any of the other classes. Still, it can be handy to have a priest in the family (place pickpockets outside church before a sermon) or a patron (pickpockets outside the inn at any time). There is not much motivation to do so, though — it’s perfectly possible to pickpocket outside church if you don’t own it — and even the need for weapons and armor can be mitigated by just having a lot of thieves’ dens and pickpocketing for cash.

If you do go into the riskier businesses (and there’s no reason not to!), a good synergy would be not with a class, but a political office — that of the bishop. If you have a bishop in the family, you can have him or her forgive the sins of your rogue, making them immune to being brought to trial for their misdeeds. And if the bishop also happens to be a craftsman supplying weapons and armor, well, that’s just icing on the cake, isn’t it?

I find myself having to apologize for the relatively poor quality of this guide. For any other class, I would’ve had savegames with rich dynasties ready to help me examine each business more fully — as well as enough experience to have tried most everything and seen where the problems potentially are. Since I don’t, I will have to reiterate the request I made earlier — if you have a good strategy or two for playing the rogue, or ideas I simply haven’t mentioned yet, please, let me know, and I will incorporate this knowledge into the guide.

Meet me again soon in the next and final class guide, the scholar guide!