Here in the SFG Development Team, we’re constantly watching for ways in which we can further fine tune the balance of our games in order to give you the best possible experience. In previous years for Guild Ball, we’ve released an erratum sometime during the year following SteamCon to implement this fine tuning, and this year is no different.

The main thrust of this errata is aimed at the Farmer’s Guild, and we’d like to speak for a minute on why some of these changes are necessary. During the development of the Farmer’s Guild, we had a few key design points we wanted to hit. Namely, these were 1) The Farmers should have a unique core mechanic which focusses on using Planter & Reaper models using harvest-markers to fuel their most powerful abilities. 2) While bringing new rules and mechanics to Guild Ball, the Farmers should be as simple to play as possible, and 3) The Guild had to be competitively viable alongside the existing Guilds in the game. This final goal is true of all new Guilds we make, of course, but it’s worth mentioning.

Looking at the Farmers since their release, it became obvious that we managed to hit all three of these key design points. The Farmers playstyle does focus on the placement and use of harvest-markers, while the Farmers are not simplest Guild to play with they certainly aren’t the most complex, and the Guild is very popular in tournament play.

However, it also became obvious that we had perhaps hit some of these points a little ‘too well’. In terms of using harvest-markers, the Farmers often felt like they had just as many powerful abilities as everyone else, but also had a ‘free’ extra resource that they get to use where no-one else in the game does. Harvest-markers could also lead to the Farmers having an abnormally high amount of Influence. The Farmers were also a little too simple to play with, their power combinations were easy to set up and a little too hard to stop for the opponent. When developing a new Guild, the ideal is always to create a team that is both simple and powerful, but Farmers could often feel like they were too simple to use for the power that you got out of them.

We’re aware the community have been having some problems with the Farmers Guild for a little while, but we’ve never made a rushed change before and we had no intention to start now. We’ve been carefully looking at this team and analysing exactly which changes we wanted to make to streamline the team to make them truer to their initial design goals, and of course, reduce their power level. So, let’s start looking at individual models.

Thresher