GUILDS improvement project

[Jurand of Cracow]

A concept of improving the guilds' system in the SSHIP

/this is an entry written in 2019, before the Hansa Teutonica building was developed/

Basic premises:

1. We don’t create new guilds, we just re-make those that are already in the SSHIP.
2. The concept changes from “a guild” into “specialization of a province”. This will fix the following problems :
   
   • one specialization per settlement is credible,
   • one "master" specialization per country is credible,
   • some specializations may be unique in the world,
   • province may specialize in “exploration” (like Portugal in 15th century),
   • a province may have a tradition of clandestine organizations,
   • some specializations may have positive effects on the other provinces of a country.
   
   
3. The “specializations” will provide the additional agents’ limits. This is going to be a counterpart of limiting the number of agents available from the “regular” buildings - that is going to be greatly reduced, as discussed many times in the past, for instance here. Therefore implementation of the changes to the “guilds” must be accompanied with the changes to the agents availability in the EDB – the “specialization” will be the major providers of Spies, Merchants and others, while their availability from the basic buildings chains will be removed (but in the capitals).
4. Keep in mind that the player may conquer also the other factions’ guilds, so he can have multiple provinces with “master” level of the same specializations. Therefore one should avoid too big faction-wide benefits. However, the HQs will be so rare (only 3-4 in the world!) that they can be overpowered.

The “Specializations”




Explanations to the tables:

• The character of 2 guilds will be changed entirely (Assassins into Craftsmen and Swordsmen into [tbd]) so that we stay with the number of guilds we have now.
• All master specialization create some trade as a side-benefit. The economic specializations usually provide more trade.
• Only Hanseatic guild is available from T2, the rest starts from T3. The “master specializations” are from T4, and the unique ones are only for T5.
• The military specializations are available from lower levels of the settlements: C2/C3. They provide military benefits (experience for the recruited / re-trained units), additional Spies (actually they'll be the biggest source of the Spies as these are agents for the military purposes), and some non-military benefits (trade benefits for they produce valuable stuff)
• The “armourer” specialization makes is possible to have better armour with lower level of a castle (in C2 you can have “c_blacksmith” but with the specialization you can have benefits of “c_armourer”; in C3 you can have “c_armourer” but with specialization you can have benefits of “c_plate_armourer”.
• Explorers specialization may be adopted in an inland province but it would have meant that a major part of the benefits will be unused.
• Hanzeatic Legue comes later in the game (after the event) so it must provide more benefits in order the player is willing to dismantle a possibly acquired earlier another guild.
• WARNING: “trade_fleet 1” doesn't work and will be replaced!
• Bonus “navy_bonus 1” adds experience for the ships, while bonus “recruitment_cost_bonus_naval bonus 1” gives the relevant discount.
• “Units available (EDB)” will all be as they’re now (SSHIP 092) for the Merchants Guild (they’ll be simply copied).
• All guilds provide for better traits for certain types of agents trained there, and also for better traits and ancillaries of the generals educating and staying there.
• To be checked before starting modding:
  
  • where is marble and metals available (required for Masons HQ and for Arm)
  • some factions could have some specializations from the very beginning of the game, eg. Cumans should have Horse Breeders.

"To do" list:

1. Noting down the existing (092) guilds and drawing up a new list of province specializations that make sense historically, for the gameplay, and would work for all 4 religions.
2. Setting and balancing the benefits of the specializations.
3. Making changes to the buildings in the EDB (coding of the benefits).
4. Calculating and coding the points in the EDG (export_descr_guilds) to get the specializations (this is a big task!).
5. Checking the EDA file to pinpoint how the guilds impact on the ancillaries granted and making adjustments.
6. Checking the EDCT file to pinpoint how the guilds impact on the traits granted and making adjustments.
7. Drafting descriptions which will be shown in-game to the player (export_buildings).
8. Checking the relevant pics if they fit the purpose (1) buildings in the settlement, 2) pic in the in-game description, 3) pic that appears when the guild is offered to the player (if different?)).
9. Any other changes?

Ideas for distant future

1. “Cavalry Militia” provided by city-guilds should be changed into infantry militia units for many factions.
2. The 4 “military” organizations should also provide a few units. The Horse Breeders cavalry, but the other infantry.
3. A “Mercenary Specialization” is possible as province may specialize in recruiting them.
4. historically, the Hanzeatic Kontors were in Bergen, Novgorod, London and Brugge (not on the map, so Ghent) from the beginning of the 14^th century. However, the most important cities for Die Hanze were Lubeck and Cologne (from middle of 13^th century), and at the end of life of this organization (late 15^th century) – Gdansk. I’m not sure how to ensure that it will happen. Especially Lubeck is likely to struggle to achieve the size required for a Kontor. Since it was the “mother” of the whole organization, I’m not sure if one should not make a special event giving it to this city.
5. The guilds provide also "missions" to the player. I have no idea how it's organized in the SSHIP, but once upon a time one may have a look at this issue.

A useful guide to the M2TW guilds is here on the Org, while the quite extensive TWC guide for the guilds is here.

Study also the issue of destroyed guilds.

The following describes that coding might be tricky if somebody doesn't know how the game progresses:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

very early on I've set up a Masons guild in one of the castles. I was quite surprised that the upgrade didn't come for 200 turns. I've had a look in the EDG file and I've found a potential source of problem. It's the " Condition BuildingQueueIdleDespiteCash Guild masons_guild s -5." After SSHIP added many buildings to the game, not all of them are really needed and not all of them should ever be build. In that castle I had, for instance, the gallows. They're very cheap so you usually have cash to potentially build them, but you don't want to. As a result every turn you're losing 5 guild points. That's a lot, especially if you compare it to the sources of points.

[WakaWakaEE999]

Was looking for any information about Guilds in SSHIP. The only things I found are these Treads:

https://www.twcenter.net/forums/show...?760138-Guilds
(In this one, I was not willing to read every post, so I don't know if there are any useful practical informations)

https://www.twcenter.net/forums/show...ide-for-Guilds
This one is great, but off SSHIP topic and 14 years old. Does SSHIP contain any significant changes in the guild system compared to Vanilla?

[Jurand of Cracow]

Was looking for any information about Guilds in SSHIP. The only things I found are these Treads:
https://www.twcenter.net/forums/show...?760138-Guilds
(In this one, I was not willing to read every post, so I don't know if there are any useful practical informations)
https://www.twcenter.net/forums/show...ide-for-Guilds
This one is great, but off SSHIP topic and 14 years old. Does SSHIP contain any significant changes in the guild system compared to Vanilla?

I would guess that up to v. 095 there're changes limited only to the points of awarding the guilds.

In the modification I was involved in (096, 097, current 098), as is mentioned in this entry,

Guilds

• The changes are actually quite limited: the logic, types and most of benefits were left as before.
• Their prices have been increased (2, 5 and 10k), while availability of the Master levels has been somehow limited (only in the large cities).
• The triggers for a guild to be offered have been reviewed but not thoroughly (it seems the guilds are lavishly offered).
• The Hanseatic Guild has undergone a significant revamp already in 096. Three additional historical events were introduced (ostsiedlung, lubeck-hamburg pact, confederation of Cologne) to determine the moment of the increase in its capabilities. Also the units that this guild make available has changed. All in all, there's a gradual increase of usefulness of this guild. In 097 there're some adjustments in this aspect, and also the triggers giving points were changed. In the patch E a problem of the guild appearing in non-eligible provinces was fixed.

I have a vision of a heavy modification of the system, but there's no modder to implement it.

[Jadli]

Good stuff!

Though, when you said specializations, I first imagined some kind of concept like for example this


Anyway, to kind of normalize the bonus given by guilds is definitely a good idea, lot of the vanilla guilds dont have a clear advantage to players indeed. I also limit spies and assassins to the guilds in my mod...

Maybe you should check out kingdoms DLCs, where are some interesting guilds as well, especially religious ones, so that could add new trees of capabilities.. could be easily imported

If the guilds are shared amongst more factions, I suppose its difficult to limit its effect only to the original faction... maybe a script could be made that destroys the 2nd or 3rd tier of the guild, to avoid stacking?

Of course, tying this to guild missions that would enable even more specializations would be great, but even more work ... so you probably dont want to do this right now...

Anyways, if you are interested my article about TES guilds might give you some more ideas about guild triggers, EDB capabilities and so on...

[Jurand of Cracow]

Pro memoria:

[spoiler]Well, based on research/testing by jojo, Callistonian and a bit of me, some breaking news on guild mechanics are presented below, discovering a new great vanilla bug. Everyone setting up guilds should be aware of this.

Regarding the guild point triggers, it was discovered that "s" score increase doesnt actually exist in the game, only "o" and "a". And it works the way I describe below, not the way described by the Guide, i.e., the "o" actually does what "s" is supposed to be doing, and "s" (kind of) doesnt do anything.

When using events that export settlements:
-"o" adds points the local settlement. Whatever else you write there (such as "s") also adds points the local settlements (the game doesnt care what you write there, as long it is not "o" or "a")
-"a" adds points to all the settlements within a faction

When using events that export factions (which is almost every usual event):
- Neither "o", "s" or anything adds any points
- "a" adds points to all the settlements within a faction

Other things:
I also confirmed in my test that we can get the intended result of "o" ( all settlements but the exported settlements) by combing "o" (or "s") with "a" (for example deducing points via "o", and adding points by "a")

And also, when more guilds have the same amount of points and are eligible to be offered, the one thats closer to the top in export_descr_guilds will be offered.[spoiler]

I did a bit more testing and Fynn checked the guild points integer using Cheat Engine. Here is what we found:

1) There does not appear to be a limit on the guild standing points a settlement can have. Triggers can keep adding points well in excess of the guild upgrade thresholds. If any cap exists, it's probably determined by the size of the integer used to store the guild points.

2) You can only get one guild offer per turn. This must be part of the fairly substantial hard coded functions that control guilds. We don't yet know how the offer order is determined if you have multiple settlements with the required number of points - it may be that settlements get 'scheduled' as soon as they reach a threshold or it may be ranked based on number of points each settlement has at each turn start.

3) If you reject a guild offer, that guild will not be offered in any of your settlements for 11 turns. This 'cool down' period has been confirmed by Jojo to be hard coded (function checks > 10 turns passed since rejection) and is not at all affected by the number of guild points any settlement has. It is not affected by the timescale in descr_strat nor the season transitions in campaign_script. Once the cool down expires, you will start getting guild offers again at your settlements that have enough points, again one offer per turn.

4) Destroying a guild building does not have a cool down period. There must have been a flaw in my previous tests. If you accept a guild offer and then immediately destroy the building, the guild will be offered again in the same settlement (and/or other settlements) the very next turn assuming the settlement still has enough guild points and the faction has enough money to build the guild.

Townsaver claims he has been offered the same guild turn after turn in the same settlement. My only guess is that the 11 turn cool down was added to the Kingdoms code as some sort of bug fix by CA to prevent 'spam' if you reject a guild (Townsaver mentions further down that thread that he wasn't using Kingdoms).