The Guild 2 Guide, Part 6: The Scholar
This is part 6 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part five (the rogue guide), if you feel like it.
Welcome to the fourth and final class guide for The Guild II: Pirates of the European Seas! Today, we will finally get around to discussing the scholar, a decent money-maker who uses the power of words! And healing! But mostly words! 
General Background
Scholars are the priests, healers, and (odd as it may seem) perfumers, of the Guild 2 world. Particularly due to the healer part, a scholar is a good investment for just about any family — there’s nothing like knowing that, if you get sick, you have somewhere to go that will definitely be stocked in pain medication or medicine bottles.
Similarly, pretty much any scholar building comes with a set of decently-earning trade goods that will keep you in the black while you fleece your flock in exchange for your wonderful sermons or excellent health care.
So let’s see the buildings, then:
The Tinctury
Like the craftsman’s foundry, the tinctury has two upgrade paths, leading either to the inventor’s workshop or to the mages’ guild. The latter, in particular, is somewhat confusing in its description (nothing new under the sun) — the mages’ guild supposedly produces the firebomb, “which can reduce whole sections of a city to rubble”. Nonsense, I say — the firebomb is an upgrade on the third tier of the house, and while it can do a lot of damage, especially without fire prevention upgrades, it really has a hard time destroying one building, let alone a section of a city.
But enough about that, the question is what does the tinctury do and why? Well, it makes the mostly useless herb tea — mostly useless, that is, until you poison a well or two. Sales pick up quickly after that (though, to be honest, the profit margin on it is still quite low).
Going up to the second tier, you have a choice between the Alchemist’s or the Magician’s Shops. The alchemist gives you D’Artagnan’s Scent for winning duels, and the Argus Spectacles for… um… Well, supposedly for increasing “perception”, but I never really bothered with it as it seems a particularly weak effect. However, following the Alchemist path will get you to the ultimate life enhancer, Faust’s Elixir at the third tier. You’ll also get the Sacred Scent, which adds a chance that each item of evidence brought before a court will be dismissed as “unbelievable”. Unless you’re going to court, though, it’s vaguely useless.
A note on Faust’s elixir: it is rarely successful. And it takes forever to make, even with all employees and the owner working on it. However, when it does work, you do get a few extra years to live — and it is perfectly possible to reach 150+ years old if you start early and put plenty of XP into constitution.
The magician path, by contrast, is much more about causing mayhem — you get the flower of discord (reduce favor between two dynasties), toad excrement (disable a building temporarily), and toad slime (chance to infect visitors of a target building with diseases; great for a hospital boost).
Special Features: Summoning and Visions
The magician’s and alchemist’s shops come with one special feature each: the magician can “summon” things, and the alchemist can have “visions”. Let’s tackle them in reverse order:
Visions are a way for an alchemist to build certain special objects using a high arcane knowledge skill and 1 each of tools (made in a craftsman’s foundry) and construction material (made in a carpenter’s shop). When you have the items in your character’s inventory, you can go into the alchemist’s or inventor’s and “Have a vision”. Your chances of succeeding depend on your arcane knowledge skill, with the formula being [arcane knowledge level] / 15. As you can see, this means even with level 10 arcane knowledge, you still have a 1 in 3 chance of failing. Worse than that, the items you can produce are vaguely useless — you’ll get either a weather rocket (which supposedly can make rain. Which is useless), a light lubricant (which is almost always on the market in sufficient quantities (because nobody buys it (because it’s useless))), or a booby trap that will hurt thieves trying to attack a building… but which also runs out and needs to be replanted (thus, making it useless unless you know exactly when a thief will be attacking).
Summonings give you the ability to turn iron into gold! Coins, even. The chance of success is much higher at [arcane skill] / 11, too.
Here are the specific summonings you can do:
- Gold (bar) turns into iron
- Spider legs turn into poisoned cakes
- Oak wood turns into an oak wood ring
- Silver turns into cash — between 500 and 1100 of it
- Frog eyes also turn into poisoned cakes
- Iron turns into 200-600 cash
- Cattle turn into sheep;
- Sheep turn into pigs;
- Pigs turn into pork
The problem I have with the above is that pigs and pork were taken out of the base game around patch 1.4, and probably never were in Pirates at all. So this is likely to be the only way to get either of them, and they’re not likely to be particularly useful.
Both summoning and visions have a long cooldown (12 hours) and require a very high arcane knowledge (which is otherwise much less useful than, say, Rhetoric. Or Dexterity. Or Handicrafts. Or Constitution), and the stuff you make is pretty low value for the effort. My advice: play with it, but only for fun (or if you really want those poisoned cakes).
The Churches: Catholic versus Protestant
At their core, the two churches work very similarly: the owner or an employee can give sermons (duration: 4 hours. Reusable every 10 hours. Timer is per-building), at the second tier they can “gain believers” (you get XP for each convert), and at the third tier the owner can “pray for god’s blessing” (temporarily invulnerable building? Yes, please!). Churches also produce various writings, and this is where the two diverge:
Every church can produce poems, which are great to have if you’re looking to improve your favor with other dynasties.
The Protestant church can also produce Thesis Papers (convert people to your faith without using the Rhetoric skill), and About Talents II (increases Handicrafts and Rhetoric). Both of these require leather (from a patron’s farm) and parchments (made at any church out of pine wood). The Thesis Papers also require holy water (gathered by church), and the About Talents II also requires gold.
The Catholic church makes About Talents I (increases Handicrafts and Rhetoric, probably less than the Protestant version; made from leather and parchments), Letters of Indulgence (allows you to pay money and have your sins forgiven; made from parchments, holy water, and silver), and Letters from Rome (reduce target’s favor with every catholic in town; made from leather, parchments, and gold).
Now, actually using a church is a lot like running a tavern, only more so: you make hosts (and, if you’re Catholic, rosaries), and place them in the sales slots. Then you hold a sermon and the faithful will flock to your church. They will buy your stuff and they may also make donations, giving you a very reasonable profit for relatively little work.
Once your church is at the second tier, you can also start gaining believers, which you should most definitely do. Find yourself a nice, high-traffic area (try the market), and start preaching there. People will stop to listen to you and, if you have a high Rhetoric skill (or a Thesis Paper), will convert to your faith, netting you some XP, as well as making them very likely to visit your church when a sermon is on. Combining this with selling rosary beads (at 237 per unit) and hosts (14 per unit, but you make 10 at a time), and preaching at the right time of day (early morning before work, or late night after work; try around 22:00, you’ll catch a lot of off-duty workers), and the preacher can be one hell of a money-making machine.
The Pesthouse
Hospitals in the 1400s were dark, drabby affairs where people went to die — either succumbing to disease or at the hands of the “surgeons” and “healers” of the time. Thankfully, G2 doesn’t bother with any of that — any sickness is curable, if you have the right materials.
At the first tier (pesthouse), you can cure about a quarter of possible diseases. Unfortunately, these are the particular diseases that also go away on their own if you just sleep: sprains and colds.
At the second tier (infirmary), you get medicine bottles, with which you can cure the (probably) more dangerous influenza, burns and leprosy.
The third tier (hospital) comes with pain medication, the cure to broken bones, tooth rot, pneumonia, and the Black Death. Once you have a well-stocked hospital, you’re all set to cure just about anything.
The way to do it is the same as serving guests in a patron’s tavern: bring the owner or an employee into the building, and you’ll find the green “administer medical treatment” measure in your action bar.
Hospitals also make various trade goods, ranging from soap to the “Secret mixture”, but the most interesting to me is the healer’s pouch — the only item I know of that lets you heal other characters. So when some thugs come around your house and bash your dynasty founder to the ground, you can just take the founder’s spouse there and get back up on your feet.
Class Synergies
These should be quite obvious at this point: the craftsman can provide you with pine wood, gold and silver for a preacher, or iron, construction materials and tools for an inventor. The patron can provide you with leather, wool, and fat. And the rogue can be quite useless as they don’t really have anything useful or need anything you can produce (though it should help to have a pesthouse to heal wounded rogues and employees).
That’s it for the scholar guide. As always, all of this is purely what I’ve seen and read about on the forums, so if you have corrections or completions to what I’ve said above, throw them at me!
When we return (whenever that’s going to be), we will have another round of general strategies, including how to use thugs — and why!
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[...] me again soon in the next and final class guide, the scholar guide! 7 CommentsPosted in Guild 2 Guide on 2010-07-20 at 14:41:41. [Permalink] 7 [...]
Awesome! Part 6 is here! You should post a link to this guide on the official Jowood forum. It’s definitely good for new players.
@Akura – I’m actually not registered on the Jowood forums — too many anti-spams. If you are, though, feel free to post the link there!
Bought Renaissence yesterday on Steam and was so stupid to start playing it. Result is I only slept 2hours and sitting at work ^^
Your guides would have saved me a lot of pain yesterday.
I’m still hoping you can go into more detail about the automation now that you have done the classes. Maybe a little test how much difference it makes in profit by either doing manuel or automatic.
Or is it possible in any building to keep workers always on certain jobs. Like you said about mines first 1 on silver and 2 on gems and later by a 2nd mine and do 3/3. But I guess this wouldn’t work for crafters since you would overflow the market with a few goods? Or does the AI not take the market prices into account either when choosing what to craft in your building which would lead to the same result?
Still a lot of questions but especially about the automation. I first want to be able to set up very profitable business and later learn more about the world of diplomacy.
PS: You are top result on Google when searching ‘the guild 2 guide’ btw. Grats
@Stelly — glad to hear of yet another satisfied reader!
Yeah, automation is on the table for part 7, along with other stuff (I’ll have to dig around a bit to see what I was considering).
As far as keeping production stable to reduce micromanagement, the primary thing that will get in the way there is not the market, but the need for raw materials. Granted, Ren comes with a “trade route” measure for carts, so that may help automation to some extent. As far as flooding the market, it really depends on two things: your production cost and the actual item — some items are more popular on the market than others (for instance, torches have always sold well for me).
When the automation AI decides to make something, it will generally pick whatever will make the most profit (compared to base price!) at the time the decision is made — and it concentrates on producing a single item at a time with all possible workers. However, it’s perfectly possible to take that part of the AI out of the equation by leaving production management on manual — the AI will still sell whenever it feels the price is right.
Really, automation is a pretty deep topic, as I keep finding. It’s also perfectly possible that it could make better profits over, say, 10 rounds or so, than a human could — but it does it so slowly that almost nobody has had the patience to wait until that happened.
Relatedly, AI will make some stupid choices sometimes, like making lots and lots of poems (which sell very poorly on market) and then sitting with them in the sell slots forever. You’ll probably notice this if you look at an AI-driven church’s sell slots after a couple of rounds — poems get made but never sell so the AI in question goes essentially bankrupt. Then again, maybe Ren changed all that, who knows.
I played again yesterday and found settings that worked good (ie profits :p). I was a craftsman with 4mines/woodcutter and Gold Smithery/Armor Forge/Joinery/Stonecuttery (also a storage).
The mines and woodcutter I had found that you can let them trade over the whole map and use 50% or 75% as price limit. 75% is ok and you can switch to 50% if you need some quick money. At the start of a game it’s also better to keep transport inside city because market isn’t flooded yet.
The crafting shops I switch between location where to sell. Because when I let them sell worldwide, the AI carts tend to give preference on selling crafts rather than buying resources. So after half a season all the shops stop working. That’s why I mainly keep it at 75% and sell in city but sometimes I’ll switch it to 100% and worldwide.
I’m making about 20-25k / season this way. But I have no reference if this is good for the buildings I have.
Also the stonecuttery is a bit different. Since there workers will keep making things because they fetch clay themselves and so don’t depend completely on carts handing them supplies.
So you can turn a profit with full automation (I only set resources to 24hour storage and only let AI build improvements but no upgrades). But to get the most out of automation, you’ll sometimes have to switch sale options.
The only real problem I encountered is when I set craft shops to worldwide sales. The AI gives too much priority to selling crafts rather than buying resources. If there are no resources and 1 finished product, it will take the 1 finished product and sell it 2 towns further :p
An option to let carts wait at their location until their cart is full would be the best solution. Then just build in a safeguard that they will wait x hours maximum until they start going with what they have. This feature is normal in eco games so hope that they will implement that.
This would give some carts taking in the crafts and 2 or 3 carts who stay on resource delivery to the shops.
In the game I’m playing, I’m about to expand to patron with my wife. But I have 10buildings allready and I have to wait first to buy the 100 000g title.
Tried clicking it 587 times but gave up after that.
I would love to destroy my storage since AI does not use it and also one of my 4mines. But the game won’t let me raze the buildings
Hey, I just wanted to say thanks for the effort you’ve put into your guide so far, it really helps a lot. I bookmarked your page and am definitely looking forward to any chapters to come.
Just curious, have you bought The Guild 2 Renaissance (yet)?
@Kriz — Yes, I have, and some later part of the guide will likely feature everything new in Renaissance from Pirates. Right now, though, Ren is just ever so slightly buggy. Until it stabilizes and I get time to play it properly, the guide remains primarily a Pirates resource.
Also, you’re very welcome! I set out to write the guide I wish I’d had when I started getting seriously into G2:PotES and it seems I’ve done a good job there
You certainly made it a lot easier for me to find my way around in the game, but there is still a lot I have to learn. I bought it during the Steam summer sale and haven’t played too much yet, the last time I played the guild was shortly after The Guild 1 had been released.
It certainly has gotten a lot more complex.
I’m thinking of buying Renaissance, but I think I’ll wait a bit.
Looking forward to finding out how thugs work
Nice little guide; I found it when I was searching for something completely unrelated, but this would have been a HUGE help when I first started… <.<
In fact it has been a help despite the fact that I thought I already knew a decent amount about the game. For example difficulty. No idea what the hell that did… [i never bothered comparing min/maxed difficulty and when I did change it I also changed maps, so I assumed the money was the default for that map...] XD
The poor explanation of several things in the game initially turned me off to it but after pushing through I found it enjoyable — this guide would have probably skipped that whole issue for me
Congratulations on the good guidewriting skills and good luck with the next part!
[by the way, one thing you can do to maximize profits with kidnapping - kidnap politicians! Multiple benefits: they miss meetings and get kicked out of politics, they tend to have wealthy families -- an opening in town hall and more moniez!]
Loved part six, Narc. I could die happy if you share your knowledge about automation in a part seven. (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)
Thank you so much for this guide. I was enjoying the game but struggling, and this guide answered so many questions.
Thanks again and please leave it up for others!
@Phileosophos: Yes, well, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I’ve had Oblivion clogging up my gaming time lately. I suppose part 7 will be the last one anyway, so maybe I should get around to that.
@David: You’re very welcome! Curious about that last bit, though — I wouldn’t think of taking the guide down (at least, not willingly).
Finally, again, thanks for the support, everyone
Wanted to add my thanks also. A few friends and I picked this up during the steam sale recently and once I found this guide, I’ve pointed them all to it.
Well done, sir.
Hey man, great guides!
I was wondering however if you could explain how the economy of the city works? I have played rogue the most, and doing pretty well. However I’m curious if the money I steal with pickpocketing/burglary and protection racket or whatever it’s called (the bandit camp option) affects the prices on items in the market? I’m afraid I hoard all the money in the town so it doesn’t expand or grow, is that a possibility?
Also, I play games with a friend of mine and after quite a lot of hours, the political offices becomes empty, why is that? It’s no fun to be the only 3 people in the whole political structure. Yet another thing, the number of inhabitants seems to be pretty stable, any way to increase number of people in a town (other than the obvious)?
@Pipboy – I haven’t delved terribly deeply into the AI economy (as opposed to player economy, which is a bit more obvious), so what I’m about to say is based more on impressions, instincts, and half-remembered forum threads. Call ‘em educated guesses, if you will. Here they are:
Finally, your last paragraph describes a bug I’ve also run into: the town gets stuck in “growing” state. When this happens, nobody can apply for offices in that town anymore, nor can there be trials. In fact, the latter is how you can determine this has happened: try to bring charges against someone, and you will be told that “city is about to grow” (or similar). Unfortunately, the town never does grow, and raising the population doesn’t seem to help (though maybe you can get lucky). To grow the population of a town you can have kids (which I assume is “the obvious”), or you can build more workshops and hire more workers.
If you’re interested in the innards, there are two kinds of people in a town: dynasty members and employable workers. Only the former may own workshops or apply for political office and only the latter may be employed in them. Further, there are two kinds of dynasties: the competitors, with colored flags and such, who are able to fulfill win conditions, and the “shadow dynasties”, without colored flags, who just own workshops and occupy political offices. Both shadow dynasties and workers are generated on an as-needed basis: when you sell a workshop, the owner will be a new shadow dynasty, and when you hire enough workers to deplete the unemployment pool to some extent, new ones will be generated to refill it.
Hope this helps, thanks for reading.
Thanks for the quick response, that answers quite a lot. On the descrption of a lot of products it says this item is popular among “poor” or “destitute” people, while other items are popular among the wealthy. I guess what is popular and what sells reflects on the general wealth of the city, I wish I knew how to increase this wealth, how to pool money into the city economy, so to speak.
Btw, what I mean by the political offices becoming empty is that npc characters, shadow dynasties or no, does not apply for offices at higher level. So that when the people that have the offices at the start of the game dies, they are not filled with new npc characters. That’s why one of the things I was afraid of by stealing money from the townfolk, that they won’t have enough money to apply for the offices. But if money spawns spontaneously when pickpocketing etc, I guess that’s not the issue. When I stopped being a criminal though, most people I right clicked on had gone from poor or destitute to prosperous or middle class, I dunno.
@Pipboy — that doesn’t contradict what I was talking about. The result of nobody being able to apply is that nobody applies, so all the positions get emptied. If you’re able to apply but AIs just aren’t doing it, something else is wrong.
ETA: also, re: “Popular among poor/destitute” — that doesn’t really seem to do or mean all that much. There isn’t a “general wealth of the city”, except in that the dynasties present there have working cash and assets, but no calculations are based on that.
[...] Thugs, AI, and other fun stuff This is part 7 of the series The Guild 2 Guide. You can go back to part six (the scholar guide), if you feel like [...]
how i can made plant colourant?
@Labeikis: As noted elsewhere, no idea, and you should ask somewhere like the Steam forums.
I am on misson 2 of The Guild 2 Pirates of the Buning sea. I have a Fully Upgraded Hospital, The Goal is to make a Pleque Mask. But I don’t see Mask anywhere in the listing for it. Does anyone Know of a Working Fourm or Walkthrouth?