Is it not too much (Guild bonus cap please!)

Isn't the entire point of Guilds to allow you to benefit like that by hoarding resources?
 
12 commerce per city isn't a vast amount. it'#s just a nice bonus. To be getting a lot of income from that you'd need to be running a low science rate, and have a lot of cities
 
The Guilds in FF are worth spreading (Masquerade and Smiths are my favorite pairing), but not so worthwhile that you give up on other sources entirely. I think that's fine.
 
I also think that the guilds are too powerful.
In fact there are two problems.
1/ 12 trade is not a big amount, yes. But for a size 1 city, with the only requirement to build a very cheap unit, it is.
2/ AI *never* use guilds (at least, it seems to me). So it is presently totally unbalanced and guilds give an incredible advantage to human players.

To my opinion, the best guild in terms of balance is "farmer". You have a small food bonus (never saw more than 2 or 3 even with a huge empire), but you have access to a nice trade enhancing building that you must *build* in your city.

I wonder if all the guilds should not be done this way. Divide by 2 or 3 the initial bonus, but if you want, you can build a powerful building in your town to increase trade, culture, production, etc, depending on the guild.

This would avoid that small cities have an insane amount of culture, trade or production from scratch. And to have an extra advantage, the city should work to construct the adapted building. More, presently the guilds provide a uniform benefit. This way, the larger the city, the larger the advantage they can get from a guild (with seems to really make sense IMHO).
 
Just an addition to my previous message.

Another solution could be to have a constant and a relative part for the bonus, instead of a specific building. For instance for maskerade, one could have :

- +1 trade, +1 culture per *type* of resource (that is at most +4 or +5, I don't remember the exact resources that can be used)

- +1% trade, +2% culture per resource (that can be +15% trade, +30% culture if 15 resources are available, that seems to be more or less the case in the example given by Vorpal). This bonus is not really significant for a small city, but for a big one, it can even lead to larger gains than the present scheme for maskerade (at least for trade).
 
I also personally don't think it is so unbalanced. I mean it sort of makes sense even for smaller cities. In one case it is just a city, in other case it is boosted by a powerful corpopration. It might get a littlebit unbalanced with masqurade when you play the spiders. Spirder's Den (I might remember the name incorrectly), adding another silk resource per city... in addition to all the other stuff you find... now that gets awwsome :D, I exploited it once
But in a way I like that corporations sort of help to get smaller cities on track... especially the stonehammers guild. Take it as a reward of being a big empire...
I'd rather increase the maintenance for bigger empires. I mean it is sort of big enough at the beginning, but it doesn't seam to bother much, once the city number is above 20... You just are able to cope with it pretty easily, if you've built up the basics at first.
 
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