Hey. Real quick and easy: I want to know what is the main difference between all the Guild 2 expansions as opposed to the original game. I heard that if you buy the last stand-alone expansion, the Renaissance, you basically get the whole game up to that point. Theoretically, If I wanted to get all the features of TG2, would I have to buy a "complete" version, or there something else to it?
Please don't google for answers, I want to hear it from someone who played the game and knows the stuff personally.

Thanks Psyringe, I'll just go with Renaissance then. I'm not a completist (not all the time :D), so I'm gonna cut my expenses quite a lot here.

Renaissance is the one to go, it has all of the previous stuff.

And the devs for the game are friendly too :)

I would recommend Pirates over Renaissance. The latter adds a lot of new content and some of it isn't well balanced. Pirates has less content but is more well rounded than even the original. Getting Venice is a waste of cash and shouldn't be considered.

Ok, thank you all for your opinions. In the end, I went with what Parvateshwar advised me and bought the "Pirates" version on gamersgate (had some extra blue coins, so why not).

This is one of the few topics where I can say I went for the pirate option with a straight face :) Hmm from my initial venture I have to say that you'd have to prioritize your staff and family. For instance, you yourself can be a full-time worker, helping your craftsmen with producing stuff, or you can just leave them at that and do other things... like running for office or just about anything other not work related ;)

From my first few hours of playing, I must say I'm not at all disappointed. I'd have to play it for some more to get a good grasp of it's quality, but apart from the bloom thing which I disabled post haste I'm satisfied with it.

Also, I might have hit a small bug in the title screen - the background doesn't show. Not a big deal, but I can't edit my character's appearance because I can't bloody well see the bastard. Any thoughts? The intro videos are also skipped, but really, who gives a damn.