Requirements
* A guild with atleast 24 members
* The guildmaster must be atleast level 40
It seems like these might be the only requirements, and that you don't have to purchase land. Information I'm reading says that you simply reserve a piece of land, and it's yours. Playing in the open beta corresponds with this; in the guild window, you can select a zone to reserve land in. Of course, I get an error message, but it says nothing about not having enough money; it's because I'm not high level enough.
Locations
There are three zones, which are called 'resource and gathering areas', which serve as the crafting centers of the world.
* Laceish Plains — The bleak, snowy, and mountainous Laceish Plains are where Cimmerians may feel most at home.
* Poitain —The “smiling sun-washed plains and blue lazy rivers” of Poitain will remind many Aquilonians of their homeland.
* Purple Lotus Swamp — Dark and mysterious, but also green and full of life, the Purple Lotus Swamp is where Stygians may gather to do their devious deeds.
Build List
Tier 1
* Guild Leader at level 40+
* 24+ members
* Keep Plan
* 15 Joists
* 20 Bricks
* 5 plain Facades
* 10 Braces
Buildings
The complete list of buildings available to build in a guild city are here. What I'm going to do with it, is make a quick and easy list of each building and it's benefit, in an order from most importance.
Keep
The center of the city, it has to be placed first. Think of it like the Tree of Life.
Tradepost
This serves as an auction house for the guild, allowing us to buy and sell with the rest of the server. It's said it's the "village access point to the global trade market". That sounds pretty important, so I imagine this being placed soon after the keep.
Walls
Wall Sections and Wall Gate - For the defense of the city… but since guild cities aren't PvP, this is just for the PvE aspect (the mob-run enemy sister city that grows along with your city). Walls might not be important for that much, if you guild keeps the enemy city in check and doesn't let it grow out of control. But it seems walls are also needed to be able to upgrade your keep. I assume we'll need to upgrade the keep to be able to place more buildings in the city… again, like a ToL. This isn't confirmed, though.
Watch Tower
It seems this would be completely useless in the PvE guild city, and is only necessary for battlekeeps.
After those, there are two types of buildings remaining. There are those that benefit crafters, and those that benefit the warriors. First, let's go over the ones that buff us in battle.
Barracks
This adds a constant buff to physical defense. I'd advise to take this first, since every class can always use more defense.
Temple
This adds a constant buff to magic defense. I'd advise to take this second, because I see this game being more melee-focused than magic. This is Conan, after all.
Thieves' Guild
This adds a constant buff to offense. Why take this last? One, the fact that it speaks of rogues makes me afraid it might ONLY benefit them. Yeah, this game is going to be heavy with Barbs and Assassins, but still. Two, because it's only physical damage. There doesn't seem to be an equal building that does magic damage, so.. we should build up on all the defense first, and then the one offense, yes? Besides, they say the best offense is a good defense.
And now, the crafter buildings.
Blacksmith's Workshop
When I'm considering the importance of gear for my characters, my weapons are the most important. I think it'd be best to get our weaponcrafters up to speed first.
Armorer's Workshop
…and then, we can do the same for the armorcrafters.
Alchemist's Workshop
…and alchemy comes last. See, I've yet to play an MMO that had alchemy play a larger role than weapons or armor. I don't see this changing.
Engineer's Workshop
Last comes siege weapons. This should be lower on our priorities, since it'll take a while before we'll probably be ready to siege battlekeeps.
Safety
believe they CAN be attacked, but not by other players.
Here's how it works. Player cities exist in instanced zones. There are three player cities per each instanced zone. Among those, there are also aggressive mob encampments, like orcs or something. I'm not sure if there are one per the zone, or there is one enemy mob city per player city in a zone.
These NPC cities grow alongside the player cities. Apparently, they are like dynamic camps. If they are left alone, they will continue to grow into large cities, and may then siege your player city. But if your guild continually attacks this city, it's size can be managed to where it doesn't become a large problem.
Now, there are to questions here.
* Can you choose your neighbors? If you can, then yeah, it'd be great if we can have an instanced zone where all three of the guild cities there are alliance members. But is this possible? Something else we need to think of… don't we have four guilds in our alliance? Seems there'd be an odd man out, and that would suck for them..
* Is this all still true? Or did they cut out the enemy city part? The last I heard about it was from those videos people took when they visited Funcom. Maybe it didn't make it in at launch. If so, having us all build in the same zone wouldn't be as important. Sure, it'd still be helpful for our crafters and general convenience, but we'd have our tradestores to buy off each other, or we could always meet up in the safe zone capital cities.
What I'm actually curious about is the location of the player city zones to the battlekeeps. Is there a difference? In playing open beta, it seems you move from area to area via NPCs, sorta like an instantanious DAoC horse route. Not every place has a connection everywhere. Is it possible the Stygian zone is further away from the main PvP zones?
I'm kicking myself for not taking the time to scout these zones out. I woke up this morning planning to do it, but the open beta had already ended. Maybe I can find time to do it during Early Release, but I do need to make sure I can hit lvl40 as soon as possible so I can begin work on becoming an architect.
Traveling to your guild city
Out side of the zone your city sits in there is a npc. Talk to him and he will send you to your guild city.
Like if your in Kosp, go to the entrance of purple lotus swamp and the npc is standing at the zone before you go in.
Suggestions
All in all, I'd suggest that crafter buildings get higher priority over buff buildings. The reason being is because you need the crafter buildings to craft the top-tier items. What's the use of having a Barracks for a defensive buff when your guild is still wearing cheap armor?
There is an exception, though, to this list. I think our alliance should communicate with the building of our crafter buildings, and perhaps co-ordinate what we build first. So, say, each guild begins their cities with a Keep, and maybe some walls and a tradepost. Then, while one guild builds an Armorshop, another would build a Weaponshop, and so on. And since I believe we have atleast four guilds in our alliance, we as a collective power will have all four crafter buildings early on. We can rely on each other while we continue to build up our guild cities to be more self-reliant.
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