Guilds

Guilds/Libraries 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 generate skill points.

Usage

• Early in game: try to maintain more than 1000 guilds to research quickly.
  • 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.
• Even once research is completed it is generally advisable to keep some number of guilds around, typically somewhere between 5% and 20% of kingdom land, depending on mage colour, situation and how early in the set it is. The primary reason for this is skill point generation, but the item generation is also useful.
  • Skill point generation from guilds has diminishing returns in much the same way as the mana output of nodes. Guilds however do not have a peak value for efficiency. The efficiency of guilds falls off as the square root function. This means that that for example doubling your number of guilds increases your skill points output by 41% (since sqrt(2/1)~=1.41).
  • The amount of skill points produced by your guild depends solely on the absolute number of guilds you have. Land size is not a factor, neither is the percentage of land dedicated to guilds - except in the sense that a higher percentage also means a higher absolute number.

(non)Related

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