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.)

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

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