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.

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!

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!

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!

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…

General Background

As the tutorial explained, craftsmen are the sources of weapons, armor, and clothing, as well as a few useful artifacts. What the tutorial doesn’t mention is that craftsmen are also the ones who extract iron, gold, silver, and gems, and that they also cut both kinds of wood. This makes the craftsman class mostly self-contained, being able to supply themselves with most raw materials, with the notable exceptions being leather and wool. The items craftsmen make also tend to be high-priced with low production costs, so they’re a good class for starting out.

Speaking of prices, part 2 of the guide recently gained some additional notes on prices. If you haven’t read that yet, go and take a look now, just so we’re on the same page.

First and foremost: the Mine

A good strategy for a craftsman is to buy a mine as soon as the game starts. And by this I really mean immediately — if you wait as little as 30 seconds, the mine’s price will have shot past 10,000 (the highest amount of money you can start with), because the AI wastes no time in hiring workers and starting production, which is reflected in the building price. Adding to that the fact that mines aren’t likely to be up for sale when the game starts, you might be better off building your own. If you do that, be careful to build it near the precious stone deposit — the shorter the commute from the mine to the deposit, the more you will be able to gather in the same amount of time.

Precious stones have a base price of 291 per unit and the production cost is as low as the minimum wage for a worker working for about an hour^[1]. So, even though markets are quickly saturated and the sell price goes below 291 easily, you can still easily make a profit selling them, enabling you to support other workshops.

Aside from that, mines also give you iron, silver and gold. Iron is extremely important for a craftsman, so it’s almost always worth extracting that. In my games, I tend to extract iron with one mine-worker and precious stones with the other two until I get enough money on-hand to feel comfortable, then switch to iron only and build a second mine for precious stones only. In fact, mining tends to reward specializing, since you can never have more than three workers, and goading them periodically tends to be a very micromanage-y activity.

The Woodcutter’s Hut

This is sort of like a mine, except not worth buying in the early game. Unlike the mine, which has precious stones to make large profits, the woodcutter’s hut only has oak wood and pine wood, both of which are high-volume, low-price items. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still possible to make profits just selling oxcart loads of wood at the market, but they’ll be much lower than what the mine can give you with just a handcart.

The woodcutter’s hut comes into its own when you own a foundry or carpenter’s shop (or upgraded versions thereof) — you can provide these workshops with all the wood they can use for much lower price than buying from the market.

Speaking of which…

The Foundry

Foundries have two upgrade paths, one leading to the Goldsmithery, the other to the Armour Forge. Personally, I consider the latter much more worthwhile than the former (making and using your own armor is a good money-saver), but to make any of the high-end armour you need leather, which craftsmen cannot produce (leather is produced by Patrons instead). So, unless you have a source of leather (married a patron, maybe?), you might be better off with the Goldsmithery, making gold chains and precious stone rings.

The Carpenter’s Shop

If you have one of these, you’ll likely be making most of your money from construction material and torches. Both of these seem to be consumed quickly by the AIs, and so both will make large profits. Together with them being available early in the game, this makes the carpenter a very easy starter.

Aside from that, the highest level of the carpenter’s shop, the Joinery, gives you the most powerful weapon in the game, the Battleaxe, which features a base damage of 24 (compare with the Longsword’s 20). However, like the foundry, the higher-level production goods from the joinery also require leather. Really, if you’re a craftsman, you’d do well to get a patron in the family, just for the leather source.

The Weaving Mill

This would have to be, by far, the least profitable option for a craftsman. Weavers require wool (from a patron again) just to start with, and the higher-level production goods also require leather. Also, the highest-priced goods you can produce from this workshop are very likely to be poorly sought-after, meaning it only takes 10 or so of them to satisfy market demand. By comparison, weapons and armor are always in short supply (even if the AI rarely seems to use them), so a carpenter or blacksmith almost invariably make better profits.

On the other hand, clothiers will quickly arrive at the cheapest armor (leather doublet, armor level 20 (compare with 30 and 40 for the other two armors)), and they are the only ones to produce gloves (leather gloves, armor 10), adding to a well-armored character or thug’s defenses.

Class synergies

I already mentioned the patrons — providing you with a supply of leather you will find invaluable in the mid-to-late game, when everyone wants cheap armor. Even if you play the patron seriously and following up on that production chain, you will still have enough leather for the craftsman workshops, even with just one farm.

Rogues also make a decent synergy because armored robbers will be able to do far more waylaying than unarmored ones, thus easily providing you with extra profit. Aside from that, robbers looting farms that are usually poorly protected (being outside of town) will often bring home small-to-medium amounts of leather, helping you out if you’re missing that all-important patron synergy.

Scholars, on the other hand, tend to compete with your leather supply early on. Still, a scholar will also use your excess gold and silver, which you’ll have little use for if you followed the path of the armorer. And it doesn’t take much pine wood to keep them going for a reasonably long time.

That’s it for the craftsman. Join me again next time for the patron guide!

Footnotes

• ^[1] — as with all raw materials, the production cost is hard to determine accurately because it depends on multiple factors: the distance from the mine to the extraction location, the skill level of the worker doing the extraction, the inventory capacity of same worker, and the duration of extracting one unit of material (precious stones take longer to extract than iron, for instance). Nevertheless, the average true production cost for precious stones should not surpass 50 per unit, whereas selling price rarely goes under 200.

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.

My assumption is that this happens because most of the interface actions require a bit of in-game time to pass before they get processed. For instance, if you have a cart full of stuff and you want to move the stuff from it to your workshop, you will see it takes a second or two while you’re in pause mode. Likewise, if you try to give someone a gift, you have to wait very patiently for the interface to update.

If you really want the game to pause, hit Esc instead to bring up the menu. At that point, the game really is paused and you can walk away from it and do other stuff. And while you’re there, you should probably save, just in case weird shit happens later.

Another often-missed part of the interface is the building list, complete with employees:

When you mouse over a building, you can see all the people associated with it, including the owner (if applicable), and employees working in that building. For instance, here’s my hut with my main character who owns it and lives in it:

The one special building in the list is the market — since there are never any employees associated with it, it expands instead to a list of all the markets on the map, as you can see here:

In all cases, you can click to select, double-click to jump the camera to that building, and hold down the right mouse button for more information. In fact, doing this on markets is particularly interesting:

As you can see, Nottingham currently has 136 inhabitants (this will be important later) and 92 buildings. Unemployment tends to be pretty stable as more workers are generated when the pool runs low as they get hired (making this a good way to grow a town). Religion is almost evenly split between the catholics and protestants, so there are likely no owned second-level churches in town. Finally, the top 5 sales and purchases give you an idea of what to make when you have a choice, but we’ll discuss those more in-depth in the class guides.

The last really interesting part in the main screen of the interface is the action bar at the bottom, otherwise called the measures list (and the actions, as you can guess, are called measures).

Measures are split into several different categories, based on the background color of their icon (though this is not entirely consistent so look carefully before you do anything):

• aggressive measures in red, featuring “attack”, “bribe”, “finish off”, and more:
  
• social measures, in light blue, featuring “court”, “compliment”, “give a gift”, and more:
  
• special extra measures, in orange: “speak” and “give item”. I’ll be explaining them in a bit.
  
• building measures, in green — these are associated with the building you’re in; for instance, in your home you can “train”, “sleep”, “view loans”, or “exit” the building:
  .
  Buildings also have green measures such as “improve building”, “increase level”, and so on:
  
• the general measures with the tan background, featuring “open inventory”, “manage group”, but also “production” (for a workshop) and more:
  
• artifact measures, showing as an icon of the artifact^[1] in question:
  ,
  which allow you to activate the artifact for whatever benefit it provides.
• There are also privilege measures, which have a purple background. We’ll discuss those later on, in the politics section.

For any measure, you can use the right-click-and-hold feature to find out more about it, including some flavor text, duration of effect (if any), and cooldown period (if any):

Now, about the extra measures I mentioned above: these tend to be very situational, and in a single-player game they’re completely unnecessary. “Speak” will make text show up in a speech bubble over your character, and “Give item” will do exactly what it sounds like.

“But wait, Narc, we already have ‘give a gift’, why this ‘give item’ thing?“, you ask. Well, when you give someone a gift, it doesn’t actually go into their inventory — it just gets assessed for suitability to that particular character, and if found acceptable, will give you a relation boost with them. “Give item”, on the other hand, lets you actually hand over part of your inventory to go into the other person’s inventory, making it possible to trade items with other people in multi-player.

There is one other extra measure, “sit”, available when you’re near a usable seat. It does what it says on the tin, and in a tavern it’ll make your character drink — be careful, they can get drunk this way!

An extra note on artifact measures: not all artifacts have a blue background. This is because, when the patches that enabled these items for use came out, nobody bothered to redo the graphics. So, with the right items in your inventory, you get something like this:

Courtship and Marriage

It’s very uncommon to “win” a game during the lifespan of your first character, even if they live to be 150! So, sooner or later, you’ll want to find a spouse and produce the next generation. Personally, I recommend doing this as soon as possible, given that the extra hands tend to come in very useful.

Now, if you’ve read the previous section, you already know the “Court” measure is in the light-blue social measures:
.
When you click it, the game asks you to select someone to court. The limitations are: no workers (to prevent you stealing away a competitor’s workers by marrying and quickly divorcing them all), never the last member of a dynasty (but warning: courting dynasty members is buggy anyway as the other dynasty can still take back their member — and the AI dynasties do this a lot!), and nobody who’s already married.

Because these limitations are very restrictive, the game helps you out by providing a list of “The best candidates” in your “Important Units” listing:

Be very careful: other dynasty members will sometimes show up in this list (see note above for why this is bad), and it’s also perfectly possible to court and marry a 108-year-old who’s about to die. Use the right-click-and-hold function to find out about the intended candidates before you go ahead with a time-wasting courtship. Generally, the safe people to marry are ones named “Serf Billy Bob” — the unemployed people in the worker pool for your city (and yes, that does mean a mean competitor can steal your intended by hiring them while you’re in the middle of courting them!).

Anyway, once you’ve decided on a suitable candidate, click “Court”, click the candidate, and you get this:

Note that this is the only way to reliable find out what class your intended is! You also get a couple of paragraphs of suggestions on approaching that particular class, but remember they are not absolutes! Other things may work just as well at certain points in the courtship.

Once you’ve decided on courting that candidate, and accepted the courtship, your character will make her way over to wherever the potential spouse is and ask them if they’ll “walk with [them] a bit”. If the other person accepts, the courtship has officially begun:

From this point forward, use the social actions to get that relationship meter up. Wait, I forgot that part — when a courtship is in progress, you can check how well you’re doing by selecting the other person:

So, anyway, get that relationship meter up by doing whatever you’re supposed to be doing for that class. I almost invariably find myself in a tavern or inn while courting, using the “bathe together”, “sweet talk”, and “dance together” actions to pass the time while the social actions cool down to become available again. I’ve also read it may be a good idea to invest in an engagement ring from a wedding chapel — it should make for a wonderful gift — but have yet to try it, myself. Assuming you’ve done the tutorial, you probably also know what to do when the relationship-o-meter is at the top and “someone has fallen in love with you”:

I’ve yet to test this, but marriage in a chapel should grant some extra XP in exchange for tying your character up for a few minutes walking there and costing money (note: I found out a funny thing about Nottingham while writing this paragraph — Nottingham has no wedding chapel! Hucknall does, though).

Now go and make babies spend the night together, and before you know it, you should have a child, and your dynasty is more or less safe. Word of advice: don’t have too many children — dynasty members you don’t control tend to just wander the city, attending church and visiting the pub, making them excellent targets for pickpockets (and since a pickpocket takes a percentage amount of your cash, you’ll feel it!).

Likewise, though, be careful with your children. Occasionally, an AI dynasty will get a fancy for one of your members and (this has been reported as a bug) will marry them into their dynasty whether you approve it or not. If they do this to your only child, it can end your game pretty quickly. With that said, I’ve rarely had problems with this, probably because I marry my child off as soon as possible. In one game, I had a fourth generation child under player control while First Narc was still alive (the wonders of huge constitution), and he was married and already had a fifth generation child ready for school.

Children

A child will tend to inherit skills (talents) from its parents — my children tend to have Constitution 5 at age 1 — and will also gain a few more random talents from going to school, having an apprenticeship , and (for scholars) going to university for their doctorate. Additionally, the apprenticeship allows you to change your child’s class by sending them to the appropriate workshop, so if you couldn’t find that craftsman you wanted to marry, you can make one instead.

Other than the aforementioned activities, children are pretty much intangible and unimportant — though I have seen them wandering around town, potentially targetable for pickpocketing. Also, it’s perfectly possible to disregard all of the activities, in which case you’ll end up with a (perhaps less talented than he would be) adult of the same class as its same-sex parent.

Politics

Politics: ‘poli’, a Latin word meaning ‘many’, and ‘tics’, meaning blood sucking creatures.

– Robin Williams

Much like in the physical world, and in the above quote, you will find that politics in The Guild 2 eats up medium to large amounts of time and money, especially at first when you’ve got many other things to deal with. With that said, it’s worth going into politics for the benefits certain offices come with. But, before I can get into that, I need to explain the political structure in the game, which varies according to the size of the town you’re in.

Town size

There are five possible sizes a town may have, all determined by the number of people living in it^[2]:

• Village — between 0 and 85 people. Villages have the smallest political structure, made up of only three offices: the village mayor, bailiff, and mediator. It’s perfectly possible for a dynasty to completely control the politics in a village with controllable characters.
• Town — between 60 and 125 people. Towns add a Head Torturer and a Guild Representative.
• City — 110 to 175 people, adds Jailer and Guild Master.
• Free City — 160 to 225 people, adds Executioner and Lease Master.
• Imperial Capital — at least 210 people. The Imperial Capital is special in that there can be only one on a map. It adds the imperial level of offices: King, Cardinal, and Supreme Commander, which may only be applied to by characters who hold the title of Nobleman or higher, and have been Mayor of a town or bigger.

Note that, because towns cannot shrink, the lower bounds here are actually unused — it is perfectly possible to have an Imperial Capital with 5 residents, though it is extremely unlikely, of course. Also note that at most stages of town growth, the offices from the previous level are renamed and gain different privileges: the Sovereign (mayor) of a Free City has immunity, can embezzle public funds, can set the sales tax, banish someone, tear down buildings, and apply at the imperial level; a Village Mayor only has the first three.

Privileges

So, now, let us explain the privileges. Some of them are pretty straightforward: immunity, for instance, means you cannot be prosecuted. Others, less so — the administration mite, for instance. And still others are mildly confusing — commanding the city guard is all well and good, but one must find it!

First things first: when you hold an office with certain privileges, they show up as status modifiers to the right of your selected character’s portrait (these are called “Impacts” in the game code):

And, because they show up there, you can right-click-and-hold on them to find out what they do:

Other privileges, such as embezzling, show up as measures (some context sensitive, some not):

Finally, privileges like “can control informants” let you control some of the special “city hall” workers:

Since the manual is missing a nice listing of all the privileges and their context (if applicable), let’s make one ourselves, starting from the top of an Imperial City and working our way down:

Yes, I know, part of that is unverified. As I get around to taking those positions and making things happen, I’ll come back and verify them as needed.

Some notes on markets and prices

This might be too basic, but the question has been asked before. You know when you’re at a market, you see goods with two prices? Well, the top one is the buy price (what it would cost you to buy one), and the bottom one is the sell price (what you will be paid if you sell one). The color determines how good a deal it is, based on the base price: if the buy price is significantly higher than base price, it shows up as a deep red. Significantly lower and it will be a deep green. The reverse is true for sell price.

You’ve also noticed the prices change in response to market conditions — if there are many units in stock, they go down, and vice versa. What you don’t notice is that this happens even if you’re buying or selling multiple units at a time. Let’s say you have 2 units of something that’s currently selling for 324. You’d expect to receive 324 * 2 = 648 for them, right? Well, what you actually get is 632. Why? Because the first unit you sold gave you 324, and then the price went down by 16, and then the second unit you sold only netted you 308, and 324 + 308 = 632. What this means is, there’s no difference in selling one unit at a time versus all 120 units from an oxcart — completely contrary to the assumption we all make, which is that the price we see is the price we will receive.

Incidentally, this is also why the automatic traders tend to sell 3 units of something at a time — you’ve told them not to sell below base price, so they’re selling exactly the number of units needed to bring the market price to base price and no more. This is also why the auto-traders tend to make so little money at first: they spend a lot of money buying raw materials but they aren’t allowed to sell more than a little bit of what they produce at a time. If you wait long enough, they will fill up the workshop with raw materials and produced items and then your workers will sit there and not do anything because they have no storage slots to produce into. The automation control labeled “sale price level of goods” determines at what point above or below base price you’re comfortable selling to the market versus selling through the workshop’s sell slots.

And while we’re on the subject, the base price of a material is the price that material will be sold at when selling through a workshop’s sell slots. There is no way to influence it, in spite of well-meaning forum posters saying the previously-mentioned “sale price level of goods” affecting it.

The final price associated with a material is the production cost, which is automatically calculated by the game for anything you make yourself. I’m not certain how good the algorithm in question is, but if it included workers’ salaries (which it does not seem to), it would determine the absolute lowest sell price you should accept for that material — anything higher than that and you’d be making a profit on the sale.

So, to summarize, here’s an annotated listing of prices for precious stone extracted by First Narc in the current guide game:

Note that the production cost is clearly wrong here — player-controlled characters do not take wages, therefore production cost should be 0.

Wow. That was a lot to digest in a short time, wasn’t it? It’s time for another break. Go, have your coffee or whatever. When we return, we’ll discuss the craftsmen!

Footnotes

• ^[1] — “artifact” is the Guild 2 name for an item you can use, as opposed to consumer goods you can only sell to the general populace. They are usually distinguished by having a blue border, though there are some “hidden” artifacts like clothing: [[shot of clothing artifact]].
• ^[2] — more accurately, towns can grow (but not shrink!) when they surpass a number of residents (these are the numbers actually shown). The code to shrink a town when it’s below a number of residents is commented out but available — it may be turned on in future (or in a mod).
• ^[3] — there is a description in the game files for this: “As dungeon master, of course you really know how to >rattle the chains< . People know how you earn your living in office, and so they will not be too angry with you if you insult, blackmail, or threaten someone - again. If you take one of these actions, you lose only half as much favour with your victim as normally."

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?

In the beginning: The Tutorial

I would strongly recommend starting out with the tutorials, which will give you a good idea of how to use the game’s interface, and get started in explaining the game to you. It will also highlight some of the bugs that may have arisen from an imperfect patching process (if you try to patch manually, that is) — for instance, if the game tells you to buy a business but you’re unable to do so. The tutorials are found on the main menu in Single Player:

Tutorial:

From here, just pick a tutorial (if you’re just starting out, only the first is available), and click Start:

After the Tutorial

I’m going to assume you’ve gone through the whole thing and found it reasonably interesting (or, at least, not impossible). In any other game, at this point you’d start the campaign, which would show you more of the game and give you targets to aim for… well, we’re not gonna do that. Let’s instead start a new game:

Click that, and you get to the game setup screen:

From here, you can pick a map from the selection box at the top-left (I’m going to use the first map, “The Sheriff of Nottingham”), pick a hometown by clicking on the map:

(I clicked on Nottingham, and you can see the Hometown changed from “Random” in the previous screenshot), pick a game mode… hold on, let me explain the game modes:

• Dynasty Mode is your basic open-ended game mode. There is no way to win, only ways to lose (by having your dynasty^[1] wiped out or left penniless, basically). We’ll be playing this one, but I’ll go over the others, too.
• Extinction introduces a win condition: be the last dynasty standing.
• Time limit — exactly what it says on the tin: the game ends at the time limit. The maximum is 10 rounds, which isn’t all that long, really.
• Mission — to be honest, I haven’t played this much yet. I assume it’s also exactly what it says on the tin: perform a certain mission in order to win the game.

Finally, you have a couple of other choices: the number of dynasties (including your own; I’m starting with just 2 because I’m lazy), and the difficulty, which needs to be explained a little bit.

The manual says: “The general level of difficulty means that you make the game more difficult for yourself, but not for the computer dynasties. The level of difficulty for missions, on the other hand, also affects the computer dynasties.” What they really mean is, the level of difficulty really only determines your starting amount of money, whereas the AIs always get to start with the same amount, as well as a random industry building (we’ll be getting around to those, too). The mission difficulty, on the other hand, determines the win condition which must be met by anyone trying to win, whether that’s an AI or a human. We don’t really care about that, though — we have no mission.

So what we’ll do is set the difficulty to Easy to give us a nice 10,000 cash to start off. We’ll also pick a coat of arms from the selection at the bottom. I’m quite partial to the yellow one myself:

Whew! That was a lot of jibber-jabber for not having even started a game yet, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to pop off for a coffee or a snack. Well, go ahead, I’ll be right here when you get back. And when you’re ready, proceed to click the Start button:

Creating your First Character

This is the first of the two character creation screens, and arguably the only important one. Your choice here will determine how you play the first round or two of the game, as well as what your dynasty name will be. We’ll start with naming:

I’m not terribly imaginative, and don’t want to spend any time thinking of a good name for my first character (especially since he or she is going to die eventually anyway), so I go with “First” for a first name. The Last name, on the other hand, is very important, because it will remain with you for the rest of the game. It’s a good idea to get used to making your online handle the dynasty name, it helps the other human players in a multi-player game recognize you. This is why I pretty much always run the Narc dynasty. You’ll thank me later.

The next part is the class selection, and this is the part that determines your early gameplay:

As you learned in the tutorial (right?), there are four classes in the game: Patron, Crafts(wo)man, Scholar, and Rogue^[2]. The Rogue class is the most radically different of all four, and we’ll get around to explaining him in the per-class guides — for now, though, sticking to one of the other three will give you similar experiences. One of the easiest classes to start with is the Craftsman, so I’ll be picking that this time around, but I’ll be detailing the actual gameplay in the next post in this series.

Let’s also get Sex and Religion out of the way:

There isn’t really any difference between playing as a man or a woman, other than that the woman will be confined at home for a short extra period after making babies spending the night together with her husband.

Likewise, religion doesn’t matter much, except that you will tend to have greater favor^[3] with those of the same religion as you (a minor effect, but sometimes the difference between being voted Sovereign or getting kicked out of politics). It’s perfectly possible to change religion at only a minor cost, should you feel it necessary, so don’t worry about it too much.

Finally, the Zodiac sign and the Talents:

The Talents are much like skills in an RPG — they determine various attributes ranging from how long you will live to whether you’ll get a bargain when trading at the market. The Zodiac sign will just give you a bonus point to one of the talents (and you can use the right-click-and-hold trick to find out which one). So let’s get to explaining the talents, right?

Talents: live for over 100 years! Talk your way out of anything!

Here’s a quick overview of the talents, to get us started:

• Constitution — determines how long you’ll live, referred to in the game as “Life Points”. It also determines your hitpoints, and how many inventory slots you have. Almost always an excellent choice for your XP.
• Dexterity — determines how fast you move, whether you dodge while in combat, and also how good you are at pickpocketing and performing burglaries without being caught. It’s useful, but not as useful as Constitution or Rhetoric.
• Charisma — grants you a small favor bonus with everyone, as well as making you better at embracing, kissing, and courting spouses or lovers. I’d skip this to start with, since Rhetoric will help you in courting while also working in other areas.
• Martial Arts — determines the strength and accuracy of your attacks. A good choice if you intend to go around killing people, but otherwise a miss.
• Handicrafts — determines how quickly you work in a business. This talent is pretty much useless for a rogue, since their businesses work differently, and it’s not terribly useful for anyone who spends little time working in their businesses (preferring to go into politics, for instance)
• Stealth — determines how easily illegal acts can be performed and concealed. A must for rogues or anyone using underhanded methods to deal with competitors; a definite miss for upstanding citizens such as ourselves.
• Rhetoric — as previously mentioned, rhetoric helps in courting, specifically when using the “compliment” or “beguile” actions, but it also helps in insulting, threatening, political meetings, trials, and bribery. For such a widely useful talent, it gains the honor of being the second most important to upgrade for anyone going into politics or who might be in a trial (as prosecutor or defendant).
• Empathy — in theory, empathy is the anti-rhetoric, letting you “see through [it] in politics, trials, duels and bribes”. It also lets you see through stealth to gather evidence. In practice, it’s pretty much useless for a player character. You might want a couple of points in it if you’re failing at gathering evidence on a clearly malevolent competitor, but otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.
• Bargaining — this one should give you good deals at the market, such as a little extra money when selling goods, or a little less money paid to buy goods. In practice, the effect seems minor so it gets a miss, too.
• Arcane Knowledge — affects the duration of artifact effects, as well as cooldowns. I’m not sure if this also affects cooldowns for actions like goading workers or bribing, but even so, it’s a low-priority talent unless you’re a scholar with a Mages’ Guild.

So now that we have an idea of what each talent does, let’s see what this means for our starting build. I personally like to start with the maximum constitution, picking Aries for the zodiac sign (+1 Con) and putting all my starting XP into the same talent. This ensures a long enough life for my starting character to get stuff done before her inevitable demise, and she’ll most definitely need it. Starting a dynasty isn’t easy, you know.

I would also consider reducing the Constitution and adding some points in Rhetoric and Charisma, like so:

Or even without the Charisma bonus:

to help with the initial courting of the first spouse. Don’t worry too much about leftover XP, as you will keep it and be able to use it later, together with all the XP you’ll be gathering from playing the game.

I’m sticking with my initial build, though:

and with all that finally out of the way, let’s click Continue:

Which leads us to the appearance selection:

Word of advice: nobody really cares about it. Hit Random a few times until you’re happy with it, or play with it any other way, but either way, when you’re ready, hit Start game:

And find yourself in your new town, ready to go and have fun:

This is an excellent time to hit Escape, click Save Game, pick a name for your new savegame, and click the New saved game button:

You’ll note the savegame name box now has a 1 appended, and if you save again it’ll become 2, 3, etc., making it easy to keep many saves over a long game. It’s highly recommended that you do so, too — you never know when a bug will render your latest savegame unusable and you’ll have to jump back to an earlier one.

Now, take a breath! You’ve gotten through the character setup and only the game itself remains ahead of you — and this is a good point for me to take a break, too. So, I’ll meet you in the next part of the guide!

Footnotes

• ^[1] — a Dynasty is what you control: not just one person, but that person and all its family (but you can only control three of the family members at one time).
• ^[2] — be very careful when writing about this class (e.g. on a forum). It’s very common to typo or misspell rouge, which really means something completely different. You don’t want to be talking about the lipstick class, yes?
• ^[3] — favor is the quantification of how an AI player feels about your dynasty. If you have high favor with someone, they are more likely to vote for you, and less likely to try to rob, kidnap, or blackmail you.

First of all, a direct comparison isn’t really possible — I’m on a proper unlimited data plan (well, two of them actually), and nobody has ever called me up to ask me about toning down my usage. Similarly, I live in a nice big city of 2.something million residents and that really does translate to good prices solely because it’s cheaper to run Internets to a lot of people in a small area, than to a small number of people in a large area.

But putting all that aside for now and just focusing on the numbers, let’s see how we can quantify my Internet usage:

Cost

We’ll start with the easiest part, determining the cost per month. I have two ISPs: RDS and iLink. The RDS connection costs me 64 RON/month and the iLink one costs 45 RON/month. Converting (and rounding up) to the nearest US Dollar, we get:

RDS: $21 US/mo
iLink: $15 US/mo
Total: $36 US/mo

Usage in the last month

Looking at my pfSense gateway’s statistics, I don’t actually have numbers for the entire previous month, but I’m pretty close. Here are the graphs I saw (click for full-size, if you want):

RDS:

iLink:

And here are the interesting numbers in plain text:
RDS: 210.11 GB in + 20.83 GB out = 230.94 GB
iLink: 68.96 GB in + 32.57 GB out = 101.52 GB
Total (rounded up): 230 GB in + 54 GB = 284 GB

Which gives us a ratio of 284 GB / $36 US = almost 8 GB/US$.

When we compare this to just over 1 GB/US$, we come to the conclusion that I would’ve ended up paying 8 times more for the same bandwidth usage, were I unfortunate enough to have Frontier Communications as my ISP.

Now, like I said earlier, it’s not really a fair comparison, in that they’re in a small town and I’m not, but still… a ratio of 1/8th the price?

And some fun

Anyway, while we’re looking at this data, let’s have some fun with it. Using the maximum columns from the two graphs above, we can characterize my two Internet connections (with some crappy approximation):

• RDS: Asymmetrical 20 Mbps/3.5 Mbps, for $21/mo.
• iLink: Symmetrical 10/10 Mbps, for $15/mo.

Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know. All I know is it’s more bandwidth than I absolutely need (and the averages agree), but since I need both connections for redundancy anyway, why not use them both?

There haven’t been many updates from me because I haven’t had much time for generating content, nor do I have that many interesting things to talk about, anyway. Work has been… well, busy, obviously, but also unusually tedious. This is new to me, but it certainly gives me an idea of where the phrase “working stiffs” came from. Nonetheless, we press forward, since nobody wants to hear about any of that (nor do I believe anyone appreciates the excuses).

I actually want to bring to your attention some stuff I’m interested in and one thing I’m proud of. Let’s get pride out of the way first, yes? I don’t know and can’t be bothered to check how many people have seen this blog’s About page, but if you go look at it now and you remember what it used to look like, you’ll notice something new… a photo! I’ve actually been meaning to add one for almost a year now, and today I finally decided (on a whim) to get my webcam working again (not for any particular purpose, mind you), and while playing around with it I managed to snap a particularly good photo.

Come to think of it, I suppose the reason I wanted my webcam running is because I wanted to see myself in a mirror without actually getting up to find one (and without leaving my headphones behind). The reason for that was to see how I look with the new glasses. They’re non-corrective “computer” glasses, which are supposed to prevent eye fatigue from prolonged staring into computer monitors. I was skeptical that they would provide any real effect, but having worn them for a few hours now while sitting here, they do seem to help quite a bit. Normally, by this point I’d be having trouble focusing and be forced to squint to keep going — which hasn’t happened yet. I’m not entirely convinced it’s not just a placebo effect yet, though, but every little bit helps. And they look great on me, too, which is a definite bonus.

Now, for some stuff I’m interested in that I’ve picked up recently. Firstly, some webcomics:

• Irregular Webcomic!
• Darths and Droids
• MS Paint Adventures

That last one is such an awesome concept that it’s worth expanding on a little bit. According to the site, “MSPA stories exist in the format of “mock games”, specifically text-based adventure games.” This was a definite draw for me, in spite of having pretty much never played an actual text adventure — the name “adventure” itself was enough for me. Maybe that says something about my psychological profile, I dunno. One thing of note about the so-far sole completed story (Problem Sleuth) is that it eventually seemed to reach a level of complexity that made it nearly impossible to fully follow — which gives us another draw: pushing one’s limits! I’m having much better luck following the story in the current adventure, Homestuck. It’s not easy to quantify why MSPA is so amazingly fun — you just have to see it for yourself.

Beyond all of that, I’m finding myself enjoying a bunch of not-new-even-to-me things:

• TVTropes
• Ars Technica
• jQuery

I’ve actually been meaning to rave about jQuery for a while now, but the truth is it’s all been said already by more awesome people than I (to whom I can’t link because I don’t really keep watch on their blogs and have no idea who they are anymore. Seriously, if I started following every blog that I ever read anything interesting on, I’d end up just reading updates for 10 hours a day).

So, that’s it for now. Hopefully it won’t be another 6 months until the next update, yes?

They weren’t kidding. My lovely 3G modem could only connect at GPRS speeds, and even then the connection tended to drop out every once in a while — which was how I found out many of my favorite lovely little apps have a terrible, terrible time handling intermittent Internet connections.

Now, I’ll be among the first to recognize that broadband adoption has been increasing steadily at a booming pace in the past decade or more, but that doesn’t mean literally everybody has one, or that it’s impossible to go anywhere where one is not available. For that matter, it also doesn’t mean a broadband connection — any broadband connection — is perfect: they do drop sometimes, even if only for short periods, and this needs to be taken into account by any software that purports to handle transfers over the Internet.

On top of that, there is no real excuse for not handling all this stuff well — it’s the year 2009, and Internet connections have been getting widespread for at least 14 years. And they haven’t tended to be fast, reliable ones, either. There is plenty of software that has evolved to take these factors into account. On the Linux side, I only need to point to wget as a download agent that understands this fact and will happily allow a download to be resumed, retried, or restarted, as needed, more or less automatically, and wget is available in pretty much even the most basic Ubuntu system, and very likely in most other “mainstream” Linux distributions. Certainly, it represents an external dependency, but one that can be safely relied on by pretty much any Linux software author.

Except, for instance, the authors of gPodder don’t seem to have ever heard of it. Or, if they have, none of them have bothered making use of this mature, well-written solution to download handling, and instead implemented something written in-house, probably just as a quick ‘n’ dirty hack to quickly get some kind of downloading support in place, so they can at least get to testing the software and get a feel for it. Which would be fine… if it weren’t still in there.

Now, I want to be very clear that I am not specifically harping on gPodder for this. It’s far from the only piece of software that handles downloads poorly. In fact, I would like to turn a particular eye towards Firefox on this front, since I’ve never felt comfortable with its internal download support. Or that of any other browser, for that matter.

But what I would like to say is that the problem of downloads over an unreliable TCP/IP network is a solved one, and solutions exist for it — well-tested solutions that are well-known and work at least 99.99% of the time.

So why is it possible nowadays to write a mostly new piece of software that downloads relatively large files (an episode of the Rathole Radio podcast is around 55 MB, on average), which are bound to take a long time on a slow connection (like a 3G modem forced to work at GPRS speeds), and not build in the capability of resuming an interrupted download?

Even putting aside the fact that a GPRS connection is not the most stable thing in the world (particularly in relatively mountainous areas), there are times I cannot justify leaving a system turned on for the several hours it would take to finish a download unless I were reasonably certain the download was going to finish or that I wouldn’t have to start over from byte zero if it was interrupted. Without that (in my opinion) reasonable expectation, I might as well not bother until or unless I could get to a stable connection to do it. And too bad if I really couldn’t get to that stable connection, isn’t it?

#!/bin/zsh

mysql_user=root
mysql_pass=your-root-password-here
bk_path='/where/to/put/the/dumps'

right_now=`date +"%Y%m%d-h%H"`

bk_fname="${bk_path}/full-db-dump.sql"
bk_gzname="${bk_path}/full-db-dump-${right_now}.sql.gz"

mysqldump -u"$mysql_user" -p"$mysql_pass" --all-databases > "${bk_fname}"
gzip -c "${bk_fname}" > "${bk_gzname}"

Running this as a cron job every [x] hours should be pretty good for small sites, especially if the archive directory is periodically rsynced to another remote host (as in my case).

For serious stuff, you may consider adding MySQL replication for continuous backup.

Oh, and since not everybody uses zsh, you can probably change the hash-bang to point to /bin/sh safely. I haven’t tried it myself, though.

Now, the comment text, when run through Google Translate, reads pretty innocuous, but the activity smells spammy; and I can’t read Russian anyway, so I don’t want to approve what I don’t understand, either.

To the commenter(s) in question: I have only a slight idea of what you posted. I would prefer comments in English, or Romanian (if you speak that one). French is also an acceptable alternative. I’ll even try Spanish.

And if it’s spam, please just don’t bother — it’s useless!

Yah, so I screwed up. Back when I moved the Web server from one computer to another, I thought I might’ve forgotten something important, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Then I forgot about that, too, and everything was just fine until yesterday morning…

Being that I was pissed off by the web server’s inability to hold an erection function properly without periodically stopping and starting udev (seriously, I still have no idea why that was happening!), I decided a dist-upgrade to Jaunty might help. I’d already done a couple of them, so I wasn’t totally going into the unknown… And it seemed to work, too! It asked for a reboot, I gave it one. It lost its nvidia driver, but asked for another reboot, so I gave it that one, too… and then things got heavily reminiscent of the Windows days.

You see, after that last reboot, the system would come up, all the way through GDM and showing the nice xfce desktop… and then reboot. Out of the blue. Lather, rinse, repeat.

At this point, I realized I was more or less fuckt… so I dug up a fresh Jaunty iso, burned it to about four CD-RWs before one finally worked, and found I was supposed to plug in a monitor because the install GUI wouldn’t come up on the TV, and… sort of backed up the interesting bits. You know, the old /home, and the old /etc, and also the /opt/www dir.

Did you notice me forgetting anything at this point? If you said “THE DATABASES!!!1oneone!”, you’d be right. Yes, I forgot to back up the databases. The reason I forgot is that I remembered there being 4x daily dumps to a directory inside /opt. Which there are. On the old web server. The one that’s not running anymore.

So, long story short, the databases are back to where they were before I finally disabled apache on the old web server. I’m going to recover the old posts from Google cache (come to think of it, I probably also still have them in the Atom feed) and repost them, but the 4 comments that were posted in the mean time are gone. So sorry.

And after I do that, I’ll turn on that damned automated backup…

UPDATE: I took a bunch of photos from the set and managed to make a panoramic pic:

These are in reverse order of arrival, and the URLs are mostly pasted straight out of the referrer log. Without further ado:

• narc ftp port (Google UK) — I’m not sure I really want to know. Do I have an FTP daemon I’m not aware of? If so, it’s probably stuck inside the LAN, since I’m not forwarding anything unexpected.
• what a narc does to set up people — Did you really think it would be that easy? Us narcs have our professional pride, you know?
• acronym for narcs (Google Australia) — Do we really need an acronym here? “Narc” is a pretty short word already. What would be the acronym? “N”?
• zap+ro (Google Thailand) — I’d really prefer if you didn’t, thank you. I happen to live here in .ro, and I like it.
• pl poke data narc (Google UK) — Er… I don’t think I really want to know what that’s supposed to mean. Using Perl to poke data into my brain? No, thank you. Although, if you manage it, that’ll be a neat hack.
• short summary of the notebook — Before I did that search, I hadn’t known The Notebook (2004) was a movie (and a novel, apparently). So here’s a short summary, then: “It’s a movie (and a book).” Happy?
• why is vodafone website so shit? (Google UK) — Good question! Without knowing anything about their internal organization, I’d guess that most of it was their use of a very crappy technology (JavaServer Pages? That’s what the JSP stands for, yes?), which presumably was chosen because the rest weren’t Enterprise-y enough and/or because that’s what the consultants they hired to do the job “knew”.
• mysql “add a fucking user” — This search actually returns a very specific result from my blog, that being my “Going Insane From Work” post, which unfortunately, doesn’t actually answer the (implied) question. So, here it is: to “add a fucking user” to mysql, the command is: GRANT <privileges> ON <database>.<table> TO '<username>'@'<host>' [IDENTIFIED BY '<password>]. Alternatively, to leave the user at default privileges (that is, none), use: CREATE USER '<username>'@'<host> [IDENTIFIED BY '<password>']. This, and more, can be found in the fucking MySQL manual, which you should’ve picked up like the rest of us do.
• arguments against alcoholics anonymous — Er… why? Oh! Oh! I got one: “I’m not a drunk, I can quit whenever I like!” There’s your argument.
• Finally, i didn’t know my friend was a narc — Well, neither did I. Which poses an interesting question: if neither of us knew, are you really my friend?

That’s it for this edition of “Silly Google Phrases”. One thing I’d like to mention, though — a lot of people have been finding my website by searching google for… narc.ro. I find this very curious, but ultimately, as long as people find what they’re looking for, who am I to judge?

Thank you all, and good night!