To be entirely honest, the more I read and the more I think about it, the less I think the guilds should make use of the guild mechanics in game, with points and one per settlement limitations. As Lif says (and I agree with him) the majority of guilds are just too "fancy", having more to do with our romanticized view of the middle ages as a time of knights, castles, and crusades, rather than the actual day to day aspects of life in that time. The actual guilds that were present were, for the most part, butchers, tanners, various craftsman guilds, textiles (including a guild for each step of the process), glazers, masons, armorsmithings guilds (usually one per armor type/piece), and then the one fancy guild, the merchants. The only guild that would have an impact on anything other than the settlement housing it is the merchants guild, and it is also the only guild that might actually approach a city leader and offer to create a presence there; i.e. it is the only guild that would function in a way anything like guilds function in the engine. For all others, they would simply evolve as those various trades evolved, as they functioned as social support systems for people in those trades, offering support for widows, providing business protections against outside threats, and also simply giving a community for the people who identified with each other as butchers or bakers or candlestick makers .
My vote is to delete everything from the EDG except for the things to do with the merchants guild. Delete all guilds from the EDB other than the merchants guild. Then make each guild that actually makes sense to have (butchers, tanners, smiths, masons, whatever) buildable after certain building prereqs have been met, prereqs that reflect the development of the trade to a sufficient degree that there would be enough people wanting a social support system to actually band together into a guild. This makes it map the actual progression of medieval cities and economies well, makes it so we can have multiple per settlement, makes it so that the guilds can have subtle bonuses and maluses, and ones which may interact with one another, and also makes it easy to implement (I could add a bunch of guilds within a week and have them all make sense and function well, if they were done in the way I'm proposing). This is also waaaayyy easier to implement because all of the points aspects of guilds that would have to be thought through and coded is entirely eliminated from the equation. The points are cool, and I wish we could use them, but limiting one guild per settlement is just not worth it, in my opinion.
So, my suggestions:
1. Delete all guilds from the game entirely, except for the merchants guild, which is left as is. Therefore, merchants will have all the points stuff still, and function in no way differently.
2. Add various guilds that make sense, but add them as normal buildings (there will be the space, given that the guilds will have been deleted from the EDB).
2a. The guilds should have rather sophisticated prereqs, to express that a certain craft/trade is well developed enough to merit there existing a guild.
2b. The guilds should have straightforward bonuses, but hidden maluses that come out if competing guilds are built, or guilds that would undermine them are built. E.g.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
2c. Few guilds should have higher tiers (this might make it possible to add more guilds, but I am not sure if a higher tier of building_... actually counts as a separate building or not), and bonuses should not be global, as guilds operated only in the city they called home. Bearing in mind that one of the main functions of guilds was as a social support system, this limitation makes total sense.
3. For the few things that don't make sense as guilds, but might make some sense for beefing up agents of for a particular region or something like that (e.g. JoCs point about better priests from Mount Athos region), use hidden resources as a way to limit the potential construction of some special replacement for the deleted guild. E.g. theologians guild is deleted, hidden_resource monks is added to choice regions and allows the construction of "Religious School" or something like that, giving the buff to priests (though I can't seem to find anything in any of the ED(X) files showing how those agent buffs actually work -- if someone knows where that is done, please let us know).
Those are my main suggestions. Any comments or suggestions are most welcome, and I'll also be interested in hearing what people think about it all. (Possible idea, we leave the floor open for a few more days of bickering between JoC and me , and then maybe Lif could make a poll as he did for the merchants thread, to see what the community's thoughts are?)
EDIT: Small point, what guilds are actually included makes a massive impact on how best to implement guilds in-game, and as such, it is crucial that there be at least some consensus on what guilds there will be. Any thougts or input from the devs (even just a hint ) would get us a long way further!