Everyone says to install the community patch before playing The Guild 2. Only no one links it. Can someone give me a link to the community patch?

Legacy Mod

Unfortunately it's to Renaissance, I'm not sure if there are more.

Unfortunately the publisher (jowood) went bankruptcy and so the Forum and all the help there is lost afaik.
Every(!) Guild title had a community patch because the developer provided quite a mess of bugs and inconsistencies. I should have the community patch on one of my storage HDDs. I will look after it tomorrow but even if I kept the patch, I'm not sure if it is the final version. Most of the community driven bugfixing was made by German guys so I'm not sure if there is an English version of the patch, I guess you wouldn't be happy to end up with german texts. :) But as I said: I'm looking for it and maybe there is a chance I can help you with that. The community patch is indeed much needed as you will see after some hours of gameplay. One hint btw: the tables in the game are made in SQL iirc and with an SQL database editor for editing SQLite and such fileformats you should be able to adjust some things. I guess you aren't interested in modding it yourself, but if you are this might be a valuable tip.

Thanks. I'd prefer not to have to do that if possible. There's only so many hours in the day.

If you have a forum link, I can try searching archive.org to see if there's any files or contact information stored.

I can't help you with the exact URL, but the domain was jowood.de and either it should be forums.jowood.de or jowood.de/forums

http://www.strategie-zone.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=165&t=7469

This community patch is meant for "Pirates of the European Seas" and is called "Back to the roots". It fixes bugs and changes gameplay a bit to be more like former guild game which most players in the community find to be actually more fun together with the new features of this guild version.
Patch 1.2 is the update for this community patch. So install this after the main patch.
Please keep in mind: I don't know if this patch is only working with the german version of the game or is changing parts of the game leaving you with a partial german game. I really hope this isn't the case.
There are two newer editions of the guild which gog hasn't released (yet?): Venice and Renaissance. For the later there is a even bigger community patch and many bugs got fixed by the developer anyways.

Sovereign Edition

I found it after jamotide recommended it. It seems to incorporate Back to the Roots and some pleasent guy made a one package installer.

That's more of a mod pack than a community patch. It seems to make many changes to the game, but I'm not finding any mention of fixing bugs. So thanks, but I don't think that's what I'm looking for.

Like Nirth said I prefer this one: Legacy ModPack + Vanilla BugFixes
http://forum.runeforge-games.net/index.php/topic,1438.0.html

It fixes the vanilla game and works with the latest expansion Renaissance. It is still being worked on and improved. It also adds new features to the game and balances the game better than in the original.

What the nerf!? Now he's talking about Renaissance?

Sorry guys, I'm completely lost here. A thousand different versions of this game, a million releases, nobody states what game he's referring to in the first place... or what language he plays.

I think this is either the worst forum on GOG, because it's called "The Guild SERIES", or it is the cleverest, if EVERY TITLE is compatible with EVERY OTHER TITLE and I'm just too stupid to see that it's all the same.

"It works with the latest expansion Renaissance" you say? But that's a standalone expansion not even available on GOG! You sure I can install that on my "The Guild 2 Pirates of Whatever"?


Seriously...I don't get it.

Since you have played that one could comment on the AI difficulty? I read that McCroy increased it and I'm still a beginner of this type of game so I'm afraid I'll start, accomplish something then suddenly lose without knowing the reason and then lose interest because it might repeat itself (the losing and not knowing the reason why).

Sorry for the lack of answer I didn't get an email there was forum activity. The guild 2 is weird as all its expansions are stand alone but seem to work with each other to see the other expansions/original game content (otherwise the latest expansion contains parts of all the previous expansions which would make no sense). I should have looked but I thought gog had all expansions but its missing Venice and Renaissance but they might add them in future. I'm not sure how well the gog version will mix with using expansions from different sources like steam. The legacy mod pack works only with Renaissance version, its gets installed into the renaissance directory, it should work with steam and non steam versions. I use the steam version original with Pirates and Renaissance together (plus the modpack) you no longer use steam to run the game with the modpack but use the exe file of the game directly.

To Nirth, I haven't played much other than to test out if each profession has the ability to make equalish amounts of income and test out the new things added. I didn't play any serious game as the version I had used was buggy and crashed a lot, I was waiting till it gets updated and more stable to play seriously but seems to stay now at version 1.0991 and that version is much more stable. The difficulty really does effect how aggressive the AI is, on hard they insult you and send thugs quite often but on easy they seem to leave you alone. It also takes some time to get used to resource changes as now some buildings require some other resources and also produce some different items.