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…
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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!
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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.
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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.
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This is part 3 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. Here’s a link to part two, the general overview, in case you missed it.

So, you wanna be a craftsman? Or maybe you just want to read about what they can do? Well, you’ve come to the right place.

The craftsman class of The Guild 2 is one of the easiest to make money with, primarily because it features the most lucrative raw material building in the game: the Mine. But before we get into the details, let’s start with…
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This is part 2 of the ongoing series The Guild 2 Guide. Here’s a link to part one, in case you missed it.

Well, I was going to continue with the class guides, but my attention was correctly drawn to the fact that I haven’t really explained the more general parts of the game — the parts everyone has to deal with, no matter the class. So I’m going to cover all that now: the fun of marriage, politics, and a few more things.

To start us off, let’s look at:

Interface: the hidden (and not so hidden) features

One particularly interesting part you may have noticed already is that “Pause” speed doesn’t really pause. If you’re in-game, go ahead and hit Space or Num – until you get to pause and look closely — see, the carts and people are still moving, just incredibly slowly.
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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?
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