The Guild games always escaped us, and even though they’ve been sitting in our library for years, we never got around to playing them. The series started with Europa 1400: The Guild in 2002, followed by The Guild 2 in 2006 and The Guild 3 in 2022. We remember people speaking fondly about the series, including its various expansions and standalone releases over the years. Now, we’ve decided to finally end this decades-long procrastination. When we saw that Ashborne Games is going back to the first game for The Guild 1 Remake: Europa 1410, we knew this was the perfect time to jump in. Going in with fresh eyes, we found a solid EA title that focuses on many different and complex aspects, such as economic simulation, dynasty management, and politics.
PC review code generously provided by Dead Good Media PR.
The first thing we did was pick a city where all the action would happen. For no particular reason, Nuremberg stood out. There are six cities available in Early Access. Landsfort Herle serves as the tutorial town, and we strongly advise you to start there since this is not an easy game and many of the systems are unlike anything we’ve encountered in most games. If you, like us, are jumping into this game for the first time, it’s hard not to feel completely lost, and you will spend a lot of time reading about the mechanics instead of experiencing them first-hand.
There are also several victory conditions to choose from when starting a game. We can play without a victory condition, aim for 100 renown, reach the Nobleman title, accumulate 200,000 wealth, or reach the required political office. We went with no victory condition because, for this kind of game, we would rather see where our dynasty takes us without having a specific finish line hanging over our heads.
We did notice that multiplayer will be coming as well, but that is not part of the current Early Access version. The planned multiplayer update will support up to 12 players, either competing or working together, but that is something for later. For now, we are on our own, with our own…
…dynasty
For our dynasty, we can pick from a number of backstories that provide different bonuses and penalties, like +2 in negotiation and roguery, but -5 points in renown. Since we want all or nothing at all, we chose no backstory, but we do encourage you to go over these options and see if something might suit your needs better. The game also lets us choose our dynasty’s crest before moving on to the character itself.
Here we can choose a gender, name, portrait, and, of course, a starting profession. We went with Smith because we liked the idea of starting with a workshop focused on crafting and producing goods. There are seven other professions available from the start, and each gives us a different business to manage.
One important thing to understand before we get too far is that Europa 1410 is not designed around directly controlling our character in the way The Guild 2 and The Guild 3 allowed, so this might come as a disappointment to hardcore fans. We wanted to try that perspective too, but the strategic, bird’s-eye-view economic simulation worked great and we feel it allowed for better immersion and focus on the business, dynasty, and political systems.
Starting the Business
Once our character and dynasty are ready, our business becomes the main starting point. We can build and expand our workshop, hire workers, and have them produce goods or provide services. Produced goods can then be sold at the marketplace, turning our profession into the main source of income for the dynasty.
It seems very clear-cut and, for the most part, it is, but there’s more to production and it’s far from an idle experience. The game tracks storage for raw materials, resources, intermediate products, and finished goods. The distance between our workshop, sources of materials, and the marketplace matters for logistics, so we often had to put on our thinking caps and consider how goods travel through the city and how the routes taken by our carts are part of running the business.
Workers are another important part of the system as well, but we were relieved to see that we don’t have to micromanage everything and personally handle every part of production. No, we can employ people in our workshop and have them carry out the work. If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on expanding the business and dealing with everything else happening in the city. Trust us when we say: a lot is happening all the time, and it can be overwhelming if you want to cover all bases. But we took everything in stride. Establishing the business takes a lot of time and effort, and we enjoyed getting the necessary resources, producing goods or services, selling them, and using the money to expand.
Money and Life
Money is a great stepping stone, but it isn’t the only thing we are building. As we mentioned at the beginning, Europa 1410 also puts the dynasty at the center of the campaign. So, when not fully immersed in making a profit, we spent some time dabbling around and courting. Before long, our character was married and we had heirs. Believe it or not, a single campaign is perfectly capable of spanning multiple generations. We started with Martin, but we wrapped things up with Elena, his great-granddaughter. So, good luck if you connect with a specific character and expect them to finish the campaign! Europa 1410 is not about one person; it’s about the family, the city, and the drastic changes that happen within. When one person passes, their child or grandchild will rise up, inherit the family’s position, business, and wealth, and continue where the previous person left off. We loved this, and whenever it happened, we pondered whether we should follow in their footsteps or take a drastic turn and walk a different path. Regardless, this is a very complex medieval business/dynasty simulator where you build something that gets passed down through generations.
Getting Into Politics
We wasted no time, and as our dynasty was fresh, we did our best applying for offices to work our way up the social ladder. As you can imagine, relationships with other citizens matter quite a lot, so we made sure we stayed on the good side of people in power. It sounds bad, but hey, we were friends first and everything else second. If friendship wasn’t enough, bribing and blackmailing other citizens could also help. Not that we did it… okay, yes, we definitely did it. Even if we had the bribe money, we always checked to see if there was a blackmailing angle we could exploit. We wanted that power!
Higher political positions give us a say in city construction, infrastructure, and laws. It was the whole reason our character got out of bed in the morning. It’s funny how, at some point in the game, we weren’t satisfied with just our workshop and dynasty anymore. Once those matters were somewhat in order, the political system became too enticing to ignore, and we craved a say in the direction of the city itself.
The systems are organically connected and intertwined, pulling on one another. By the late game, we could finally see how much those systems had become intertwined. Business provides the economic foundation, the dynasty gives continuity across time, and politics turns your growing influence into something much bigger. The journey getting there was long but it feels well worth it.
What’s Coming?
More professions and maps are planned as time goes on. Later updates will also expand the economy, politics, crime, and family systems. We’re very excited to see how the planned combat-focused update will add the Thief, Robber, and Guard professions. Then, there’s the multiplayer update for those who’d like to jump into this cutthroat period with up to 12 players. The Moneylender and Trader are planned for the 1.0 release.
For the time being, all of that can wait since we have a city, a dynasty, and a profession to manage.
Building a Dynasty in Europa 1410!
We’ve already spent enough time with our little dynasty to know that we’re not done with Nuremberg yet. There’s still more to learn, more businesses to build, more political positions to chase, and plenty of room for our family to make questionable decisions. For series we somehow managed to ignore for more than two decades, The Guild 1 Remake: Europa 1410 has given us more than a few reasons to stick around. And that’s exactly what we plan on doing!
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