Quote Originally Posted by Foz
I agree with Daveybaby that the guild system is entirely too borked to lend any credence to the notion that Horsebreeder guild design may be intentional. The immediate tip-off is that it has guild points granted by a structure (the stable series) that cannot even be created in the same sort of settlement that it is available in. That is not only counter-intuitive, it is just plain stupid, and I refuse to demean CA developers by even suggesting that they might've designed the system to be so absurd.

It seems likely that either:

- Horse breeders guild is incorrectly limited to city only
- Stables were supposed to be available in cities

The former looks far more likely to me, and so working on the assumption that CA devs are not poor enough to intentionally design Horsebreeders the backwards way it currently is in the files, it seems the most prudent thing to do is simply grant the guild to castles as well where it seems like it should naturally be anyway.

Middle_eastern factions should have a sufficient edge with the guild still, as they continue to be able to recruit cavalry from cities, and get huge boosts to the guild total by constructing the racetrack series as well.

As to the comments on the thieves guild being everywhere, I've been trying to come up with a good way to beat that. The best I have so far is to somehow limit the guild to one instance per faction. My first idea was to make the guild points required for the guild and the m_guild be exactly the same amount (or 1 apart if identical is not allowed), and set them both for the same minimum city size requirement. This would essentially grant the m guild the first time a settlement gets offered the guild, and would ensure that only one could be in existence inside a given empire unless it captured more. It's a little sloppy, but it's way easier than trying to screw around with balancing the guild points that guild receives.

Alternately (and better if it works), I think you can attach a faction_building_exists check to the guild buildings in the EDB. I'd basically require "and not faction_building_exists >= thieves_guild" for each level, along with the faction requirements. This would actually keep all guild levels intact, but not allow a second thieves guild to be built if any already exists in the faction. Should check their proliferation nicely.
A good way to minimize thieves guilds is to edit out the "Spymission" and "Spyinsettlement" triggers. That way, thieves guilds will only appear where they are trained, and this will limit them nicely. If there are still too many, or two few for your taste, play around with the numbers on the "spytrained" trigger a little. I've set the number to 8 and upped the points for the first level to 125, and I've got the number of thieves guilds I want...