Guilds

Guilds are buildings that are essential to create items and skillpoints and even more when conducting your spell research early in the game.

Effects

• Guilds provide the same population space as wilderness, namely 10.
• Guilds take considerable geld upkeep to maintain
• Guilds also generate magical items at random intervals.
  • Science God Favour increases chances of item generation
  • Guilds only generate lesser items (including Minor Indulgence and Magical Compass).
  • Even with zero guilds you can still store items (unlike nodes-and-mana)
• Guilds provide a bonus to skill acquisition time (tested across all servers).
  • This is capped at 5% of your land. Building more guilds does not influence skill generation. (This information is incorrect for some servers. Guilds above 5% do increase the speed at which you learn skills.)

Usage

• Early in game: try to maintain more than 1000 guilds to speed up research
  • If you have trouble upkeeping the high amount of guilds on small land: sell the items!
  • Guilds build quite slow. For efficiency, after exploring, first build workshops one-turn-by-one-turn to a few hundred (and also build some towns and farms to upkeep stuff) -- thereafter build remaining wilderness to guilds, -- thereafter destroy 25% workshops and build that wilderness also with guilds.
• Thereafter: try to maintain 5% of your land as guilds, to generate skill points efficiently

(non)Related

The word guild is also used for groups of mages playing together in a coordinated way, e.g. Supporting Guild Status