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 :)

Despite being a THE GUILD fanboy (obviously), I must chime in to inform you that The Guild 2 is not that great.

The concept is sound and it follows the same paradigm that makes The Guild so AMAZIGN AND THE BEST GAME EVER THERE IS NOTHING BETTER THAN THE GUILD IN THE WHOLE WORLD but adds the simple mechanic of walking.

You have to control your character around the town. Now, I think this would be an amazing feature if the time scale wasn't the same as The Guild. I found myself having to choose days in which I walked and days which I worked because I wouldn't have enough time to do both.

Maybe I was doing it wrong. I was expecting it to be The Guild but with a big number 2 on it and instead it was The Guild in the form of a big number 2.

Maybe I should give it some more time. If you do buy it in the end, let me know how it goes. I still have it on my GamersGate shelf raring to go.

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.