Well I've got an update on the thieves guild stuff I was talking about. First off, you in fact cannot set the thiefs_guild to exclude itself - it won't compile correctly on game startup, and yelled at me for trying to make something exclude itself

The next option in line was to try to test for a thiefs_guild building each time a turn starts, and if one is found then to beat down the thiefs_guild points of all the other settlements. What I tried looked like this:

Code:
;------------------------------------------
Trigger Whatever
    WhenToTest SettlementTurnStart

    Condition SettlementBuildingExists >= thieves_guild

    Guild thiefs_guild o -500
Basically, when a settlement is processed for its faction's turn starting, this will fire. If a thieves_guild or higher is found (yes thieves_guild is correct, the building name is from the EDB and different than the guild name in this file) then it should subtract 500 from the thiefs_guild points of all other settlements in this faction.

So, I fired up a new English campaign to see what would happen. I got offered a Thieves Guild in Rennes as my first offer anywhere, which isn't that surprising given how much I was using the spy you initially start with - if he does 10 missions, you've earned 100 thieves guild points everywhere. I took it there, to see how it would play out once my trigger was hopefully firing every turn in Rennes. I didn't get offered any other guilds for a while. London where I was trying to build for Mason's Guild got offered a guild next: a Merchant's Guild, also not surprising, I prioritize economics pretty highly. Then came the stumper - London got offered a Thieves Guild on the turn after I declined the Merchant's Guild. I declined that and got the Masons I was looking for on the next turn, but if the trigger was working like I thought, I wouldn't have been offered a Thieves Guild at all in London.

So, what happened? I couldn't have built up 100 points in London in a single turn - I produced no spies anywhere, nor any brothels, so it could at most have gained maybe 25 points from my one active spy and if say London upgraded that very turn.

Here's what I consider as possibilities:

- The settlements lost no points from their thiefs_guild totals because I set the malus too high. It's possible that the modifier is just not applied if there are not as many points to lose as are required, in which case the trigger I tried would only affect anything if a settlement had 500 points built up already.
- The changes to the file do not stick. We've found a couple settings in the EDU that just do not take changes at all... but in this case I think it's unlikely, since triggers have never shown this behavior to date.
- Some as yet unknown item(s) gained London tons of thieves guild points all in the same turn. This seems quite unlikely, as the reason for the txt file is to lay out the guild behavior, and I see nothing in it that should do this.

So currently I'm running with the first idea, that the malus is too high and therefore not affecting any settlements. I think next I'll try -100, as it represents the exact amount needed to build the first guild level. I'm not sure whether it belongs at turn start or turn end though. It depends when guild points are updated for a settlement, and when the event to offer a guild springs. Thinking about it for a moment, I'm guessing triggers from the same file are checked in the order they appear in that file... so if I make sure to put the new trigger at the very bottom of the guild file, then all guild points should be gained first (from the building-related triggers in the guild file), and then 100 removed if the total is high enough for thiefs_guild and any settlement has a Thieves Guild building already. As some guild points trigger on turn start though, I think I should actually duplicate it for the beginning and the end of the turn. I'll post results when I get 'em.