Ramblings of Narc

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 it.

Welcome to the seventh and hopefully last installment of this guide to The Guild II: Pirates of the European Seas! In this part of the guide, we’ll be covering all the stuff I’ve been asked about: automating production, using thugs, doing guild contracts, and anything else that catches my addled memory or divided attention. As always, feel free to put questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them (though maybe not promptly). If I get asked the same question enough, I’ll probably update the post!

But before we get into all that, a special note now that Guild II: Renaissance is out and reasonably popular: this guide is mostly, but not completely applicable to G2Ren. By this I mean, the stuff that’s been introduced in Ren tends to mostly use the same mechanics and methods of thinking, but I make no guarantees. Similarly, this guide assumes you’ve at least gone through the Pirates tutorial — this is quite impossible for Renaissance players, because Ren doesn’t include any tutorial. I strongly encourage anyone with a bit of spare time and a passion for Renaissance to work up a guide. Feel free to link, copy, or just reuse bits of this guide — in accordance with CC-BY-SA, all I ask for is attribution and continuing with the CC license.

Now, with that out of the way, let’s start with…

Production Automation

When G2 first came out, production automation was available only to tier 2 and 3 businesses, a restriction that has since been lifted — presumably because it made mines and woodcutters completely un-automatable. But you’re not here for a history lesson.

Automation is activated from the measure “Manage Building”, and when you see it for the first time, it looks something like this:

As you can see, automation is divided into multiple sections — types of things you can give up to the AI or maintain yourself: production, trade, employee management, and building investments. As you’ll further see when you turn it on, each section has an upkeep cost, and if you turn off AI management for that section, you will not pay the cost.

Production management

The primary, biggest problem the management AI has is that, in the short term, at least, it doesn’t seem to make much money. In fact, it seems to spend almost all the money you can throw at it and ask for more. This is primarily due to the production management it does, particularly the option “Keep raw materials for”.

When you turn on the management AI, and it has access to carts, and doesn’t have enough raw materials to produce continuously for as long as you’ve told it to, it will send out the carts and buy more — of everything! That means if you are able to build, say, Plate Mail (4 leather, 8 iron, 2 gold), in about 3 hours per unit, and you’ve told the AI to keep 16 hours’ worth of raw materials, it will do some simple math and conclude it needs to have enough raw materials to make 6 units (rounded up, of course): 24 leather, 48 iron, 12 gold.

The AI will do this calculation for every product you can make in that workshop, and let me tell you, it gets really expensive when you are able to produce precious stone rings, even though you never would because you’d be losing money selling to the market and you can’t really afford precious stones. Worse, just because the AI buys all those raw materials doesn’t mean it’ll actually use them — it does seem to correctly determine the best-selling production item at any given time. But, hey, there’s a money drain.

One other thing of note is that the AI can sometimes get “stuck” making items that don’t sell. I’ve had this happen with poems from churches and cakes from bakeries. What I assume is happening is: the AI sees the item on the market is rather close to the allowed sell price, so it produces it — but nobody ever buys it. The market price level stays tantalizingly close to the allowed price, so the AI is spurred to produce more, and meanwhile, the produced items stay in the sell slots where they also do not get bought. If this happens, it may be a good idea to set the production selection to manual and scattergun your employees among several things that sell properly. The AI (if allowed to trade) will sell the goods and buy raw materials automatically, and you can just relax, for the most part.

Trade management

Here’s another place lots of players lose money, at least if they have any rogue competitors: trading in remote cities. You have a choice between auto-trading on the whole map or only in the nearest city — and by default it’s set to “whole map”. This means carts are going to go far away (not really making any money along the way, obviously), and they’re likely to meet robbers along the way, and all that work used to produce those goods will be lost, alongside the potential profit you would’ve made. This can be positively crippling if the cargo was particularly expensive and/or difficult to make, as you can imagine.

On top of that, you have the “sale price level of goods”. A lot of people seem to think it sets the sale price when using the sell slots. This does not seem to be true (sell slots use base price, always). Instead, this setting tells the AI how much lower (or higher!) than base price you’re willing to sell to the market. Let’s have an example fictional item with base price 200: when you tell the AI to sell only at 100% or higher, it will not sell the item if the sell price would be 199 — instead, it puts it in a sell slot, where it sells for 200… if it ever sells. If you set it to 75%, you tell the AI it’s acceptable to sell for as little as 150 per unit. If your production cost is something like 12 (and I’ve seen that kind of discrepancy), you may even want to go lower (but remember the setting applies to all products).

For a test, I gave one of my families an armor forge, fully automated but set to sell down to 75%. I also spent pretty much all of the 22k cash they had (together with the AI, who was buying raw materials), leaving them around -4500 at the beginning of a new round. Then I waited.

At 20:00 in the same round that started with -4500, I had 6000 cash with no other money input. Production seemed to focus mostly on longswords, tools and daggers, though we have 9 silver in storage, enough to make 9 full helms — which never really get produced. I might’ve been able to make the same amount of money myself, but not much more than that.

Another point of interest in trade management is the buying and selling of vehicles. The AI tends to transport small amounts of goods at any one time, so it should be buying primarily handcarts (and maybe horse carts for cross-country runs). Also, I’ve never seen the AI sell a vehicle. Unfortunately, the AI can be somewhat retarded about buying the right thing so… I’d leave this off and just provide as many handcarts as the workshop can handle. Maybe with a horse cart thrown in.

The last setting, sales depot, determines what the AI will put into the sell slots of a workshop — whether to attempt direct sale of artifacts, or just not bother. I would go for “consumer goods only” because artifacts rarely seem to sell directly from a building (I had Mead in the sell slots of an inn for several rounds and never saw it get bought). However, note that this doesn’t restrict what will get sold to the market — if the AI determines it’s a good idea to make an artifact, it will also throw it into a cart and sell it off at the market.

One interesting irritant I’ve come across when automating trade is that owning two or more buildings in the same production chain leads to weirdness. Take this example of a bakery and farm (thanks, Phileosophos!). It’s extremely common to find the bakery cart going to pick up wheat and fat from the farm… and leaving with a cart full of pastries! Which it then leaves behind at the farm (if it has room to do so), clogging up the storage slots until you clear them out. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a way to fix this — as far as I can tell, the automation AI believes that the only place it can get raw materials is from markets, so it assumes the farm is also a market and “sells” the pastries there.

Employee and Investment management

I’ll lump these two together because they’re rather boring and self-explanatory. I’m unclear on the Investments setting — it has “minimum”, “normal”, and “maximum”, but my armor forge set to “normal” got all improvements, as I expected. You may wish to turn off auto-leveling if you have a building that has two upgrade paths — you probably want a weapons forge/armor forge for your first foundry, but the AI may decide a goldsmithery would be better — but otherwise it all seems to work quite well.

Special note to readers: I’m very interested in your experiences with workshop automation! In particular, which workshops have you found do poorly, how much starting money you had, and how long you let the AI do its thing. In my experience, it takes about one round for the AI to get its act together, and a reasonable amount of seed capital to buy raw materials with.

Now that we’ve explored the world of workshop automation, let’s skip on over to:

Houses and Thugs

Houses are among the most important buildings in an extinction game, because these are what allow any character class to use nice, well-armed men and women to defend themselves from aggression — and to produce some aggression of their own.

But first, the other hidden feature of the house: determining where you are allowed to go into politics. Have you ever had the pleasure of having the “Can apply at the imperial level” perk active and being in the wrong town to do that? It’s not too much of a problem — all you have to do is buy a house in the imperial city, send your imperial character there, and “assign residence”. Note that if you try to do this without giving up the office you’re already holding, you will get a cryptic error message stating “Character Name is in office in this settlement”, so you’ll have to resign that office first. Don’t worry, the imperial level perk remains active for a day or two (not sure which) after you resign, so you can jump straight up there as soon as you’ve moved in to your new house.

Now, to the thugs. Thugs are incredibly multi-use in this game — as you’ll see from a fully-upgraded third tier house, their list of aggressive measures is quite long. Let’s look at each in turn:

• Shadow someone — as the description says, this will show you the exact attributes of a non-dynasty member after a while of shadowing.
• Attack — the same measure as available to controlled characters, this will kill enemy employees (such as other thugs, robbers, or even fishery workers), but on dynasty members it will only render them unconscious. This is because killing a dynasty member is considered murder, so the game happily lets you stop before you actually kill anyone important. When unconscious, a person can be robbed, kidnapped (by rogues only!), or finished off. We’ll get around to those in a little bit.
• Capture building — buildings can only be captured if their health bar is red. Ordinarily, this will rarely happen, as the AI tends to be very careful about repairing buildings long before they get down there, but note that attacking a building disables its repair ability (it also brings the city guard and bailiffs on the attacker’s head, however). Buildings will also not be repaired if their owner has no money to repair them with, and it seems mine owners tend to be broke. The strategy that suggests itself here is a tried-and-true winner.
• Rob — as mentioned above, you can only rob unconscious people. They don’t need to be unconscious by your hand, though. If you’re going to kill someone, try to remember to rob them first. You’re already getting the assault and murder charges, might as well make a little money out of it (more often than not, “a little” is exactly what you’ll obtain).
• Spy on someone — this is the most effective way to gather strong evidence against a competitor, but it requires that your employee actually observe the heinous act.
• Send patrol — exactly what it says on the tin. Click twice on the same spot to end the patrol path. City guards and bailiffs are continuously executing this measure.
• Escort — again, what it says on the tin. It is far more efficient to guard a one-time shipment with thugs than to buy escorts for the cart (which can never be sold). Much less efficient if the path is a commonly used one — cart escorts are one-time purchases.
• Ask around — lets you gather evidence by asking people what they might’ve seen. Evidence gathered this way is rarely strong, but can provide a lot of extra material to pad the evidence roster if taking someone to court.
• Sabotage (bomb) and Sabotage (firebomb) — the only difference is the firebomb seems to be more likely to start a fire (and it might do more base damage). Sabotage is a crime, but the city guard will not come to kill your employee if they’re seen, unlike attacking the building. To balance this, sabotage doesn’t disable building repairs (unless the building is on fire), and a building cannot be sabotaged twice in six hours.
• Finish off — as explained earlier, only unconscious competitors can be finished off, and if you do that, the murder charge tends to be one of the most likely to get your head chopped off. On the other hand, in the right conditions (don’t be seen doing it), killing off a competing dynasty’s future is almost always a good thing.

My personal most common use pattern for thugs involves finding a mine (well outside town) that’s selling for a large sum of money (100k is not unheard of), sabotaging it until its health is in the red, and then capturing it and selling the contents. Second most common is gathering up a large number of thugs (I think six or seven is the maximum for the fully-upgraded fifth tier house) and killing off the competition. I’ve also had great success with single-waypoint patrols: a thug set to “patrol” directly in front of a business that comes under attack often.

Guild Contracts

You’ve probably noticed and/or been irritated by all the guild contract messages going around. “The rogues guild of Sometown is looking for 5 poison daggers at 2000 each” is all well and good, but there’s no rogue building that produces poison daggers… or is there?

In truth, you could say that any rogue building can produce poison daggers, because the production chain here is a bit different. But let’s start from the beginning:

There are two types of contracts: “go somewhere for X hours and receive money” and “make Y of a special item and receive money for each unit made”. Each of these two types exists for each of the four guilds (which are based on the four classes): craftsman, scholar, patron, rogue.

Now let’s see about fulfilling these contracts. The first type, “go somewhere and receive money” shows up like this:

The guild of rogues in Nottingham is awarding the following contract:

A mercenary captain, armed to the teeth, is wanted for a feud among the nobility in Lisbon.

The contract will last 9 hours and will pay 1,400.

I’ve highlighted the only important parts in the message above — you need to be a rogue, you will be unreachable for 9 hours, and will receive 1,400 cash at the end of the contract. You should keep in mind that once the contract is accepted, your character will be unavailable for the contract’s duration. In particular, your character will not be going to elections or to trials, which could be a problem.

The second type of contract is slightly more complicated to fulfill, and it looks like this:

The guild of patrons of Mácon is offering a trading contract for a sultan from the Orient for 4 Barrels of Alderman’s Brew, at 600 per unit.

Again, I’ve highlighted the important parts: you must be a patron, in Macon, and you need 4 units of the special item, and will be paid 600 per unit delivered. Here’s how this goes: take a patron, go to any guild hall, and click “Buy manufacturing instructions”. You will be shown a dialog detailing what you need to make a unit of Alderman’s Brew (1 sugar beet, 1 wheat, 1 weak beer), and asked to confirm that you want to buy the instructions.

Once you’ve got the instructions, you need to go to a workshop you own, wherein you will be able to activate the instructions just like any other artifact. If you don’t have the required materials available, you will just be told what you need. If you do (and they can be in the workshop storage or in the character’s, or anything in-between), you will be asked to confirm. Then, after however long the game says it will take, the recipe in your inventory will be replaced by one unit of the special item, which you can and should then take with you to the guild hall.

In either case, to fulfill the contract, go to the correct guild hall and click “View the guild order book”. You will be presented with a confirmation screen, which you’re probably going to want to accept.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’ve found contracts a decent way of making a little extra money in the early game, but if you do the math, a level 5 character with a tier 3 workshop and enough raw materials can easily beat the payouts you tend to get from these jobs. And the travelling limitation leaves you unavailable for political meetings or for court, making those contracts particularly troublesome in the mid- to late- game, as well as for an early-game politician. Furthermore, there’s no XP gain for fulfilling guild contracts, which is a particularly painful restriction. Overall, unless you’re really bored or really low on cash, it’s much better to just ignore guild contracts altogether.

More?

That’s pretty much all I can remember wanting to cover in this, the last part of the Guild 2 guide. I’m sure there are plenty more things to be explained, but I can’t think of any right now, so I’ll call it a day. I’d like to ask all of you reading this to consider what you think is missing — what have I explained poorly, and what have I just failed to explain altogether. I’ll collate the suggestions, requests, and questions, and will answer them all in part 8.

However, I would like to remind you this guide is for The Guild II: Pirates of the European Seas, not for Renaissance. I may write an add-on to this guide detailing the differences between Pirates and Ren, but as I haven’t gotten to play Ren much lately (which doesn’t seem to be changing in future), it won’t be very soon.

As I said before, though, I invite anyone with time and passion to either update this guide for Renaissance, or write their own. If you do, and you send me the link, and I like it, I’ll place it in a high-visibility location on each guide page, and everyone wins. Alternatively, if you want me to pay for the bandwidth, send me the text and I’ll publish it here, with attribution if desired.

Thank you for reading The Guild 2 Guide. Here’s a link back to part one, if you’re looking for the beginning.