The Guild 2 - Medieval Business Simulation Game for PC | Build Your Dynasty & Trade Empire | Perfect for Strategy & RPG Fans

Straight to the point, I don't recommend this game. Guild 2 offers a lot of flexibility and replayability. However, they tried to put too much into it and succeeded in making it completely unrealistic and frustrating. Guild 2 attempts to meld an economic simulation with a dynasty role playing game. Essentially, you pick a trade, open a business, and try to make money. The classes include Craftsman (smith, tailor, carpenter, miner, or woodcutter), Scholar (priest or alchemist), Patron (Farmer/Livestock, Baker, or Innkeeper), or Rogue (Thief or Bandit). Along the way Guild 2 offers lots of distractions like going to a tavern, going to church, running for a town office, courting a mate, and having kids. It's a neat idea, but the gameplay was poorly designed.What went wrong? I think the most unsatisfying thing about Guild 2 is it is dynasty simulation where you direct the lives of a family from generation to generation, but you can only control three family members at one time. The family members that you don't control basically don't advance until you take control of them. To top things off, once you control a family member as one of the three, if you remove them from your control to add someone else you can never control them again. Yes, your kids can go to school and go to an apprenticeship (further advancement allowed for scholars), but once they do this they make no further advancement until you take control of them. You can't even hire them into one of your businesses to gain experience. You even needed to have multiple businesses left at lower levels of advancement to allow a new dynasty member to gain experience so he could control the more advanced buildings. If you haven't played the game, this might not make a lot of sense, but basically this was very annoying due to this limitation.As you play the game you will also notice a lot of unrealistic issues. The most apparent is that each day (turn) in the game represents 4 years of game time. There is daytime and nighttime in this turn (4 year period), yet each turn also is a change in season. I understand they want to have the daily life merged with career and family, but the result is just plain stupid. Again they tried to do too much and degraded the value of the experience. I also noticed the abundance of women in politics which is abnormal for the medieval period. Maybe one member on council, but not all of them.Another disappointment was the trading part of the economic simulation. The game forced you to move goods to the marketplace even in the same city as the business was in. You could also put things for sale in your storefront, but you would only be paid a preset "base" amount. There is auto features in the game for managing businesses, but they were very limited. While it does not have the depth of options for businesses as Guild 2 does, Patrician 3 handled the economic system much more simply and enjoyable.There is some combat in Guild 2, but it makes you wish there wasn't. You don't really control anything in combat except maybe causing it and once you're in there is no getting out. Basically, the game keeps going until one side is beaten. No withdrawing allowed. No surrendering. Henchmen die, hit the ground, and fade away. Named characters are knocked unconscious (you can finish them off if you so desire). Basically, it's more of a nuisance and an irritation rather than a feature.A couple more gameplay issues that I didn't like, courting and favor with other characters. Courting is really not that fun. Basically, you just select several options to make them fall in love with you like compliment, kiss, embrace, dance, take a bath, etc. You can only select activities so frequently, so this requires telling the partner to follow you until the options are available again. Again it's more of a nuisance which distracts you from running your business and courting needs to be done quickly sense every day is 4 years. The attitude of other characters is controlled by favor. The system for improving favor is stupid and more of a nuisance. Read poems, give gifts, give compliments and other courting actions.There are a lot of cool things about the game like the numerous upgrades available for individual businesses and the variety of types of businesses, but the good is definitely overwhelmed by the bad.There are expansions to this game The Guild 2 - Pirates Of The Seas and The Guild 2: Venice. They both offer more trades and maps as well as and naval trading and combat.I have a pretty advanced computer with Vista running the The Guild 2 Gold Edition with patch 2.1 and did not experience any crashes or lag even on highest graphics settings. The only irritating thing was speech would repeat in loops when I slowed the speed down. Drove me crazy. I also noted some other minor glitches, cart moving without carrier, level-up glow not dissipating, etc. Looking at the patch lists, there were majors bugs when it was originally released.