While the month isn’t over yet, I think it’s safe to say that March 2017 is likely to be remembered as a landmark month in WARMACHINE and HORDES history. Certainly we at Privateer, along with the WARMACHINE and HORDES community at large, experienced a number of significant changes in the last few weeks, from the shift in how we will more directly support retailers and organized play efforts at the local level following the close of the Press Gang to the restructuring of the forums in preparation for the launch of Community Integrated Development that has redefined the model development process for WARMACHINE and HORDES. I don’t think anyone would argue that this March can easily be described as “interesting times.”

Let me take a moment to say thank you to everyone in our great community for their patience and forbearance in dealing with everything that has been announced this past month. While some have asserted we were walking away from our community by streamlining the forums, I hope the immediate success and momentum we’ve seen with Community integrated Development makes it clear we have never been more focused and connected to the WARMACHINE and HORDES community than we are right now. Far from turning away from the players of our games, we’ve invited the entire WARMACHINE and HORDES community into our development process so you have a voice in and a direct influence on the rules you’ll be playing on the tabletop.

Designing an environment conducive to making CID productive required changes, and everyone here at Privateer knows change is never easy, especially when big changes seem to come one right on top of the other. However, rest assured that as we move forward into the future, we have passed through the roughest of waters. The ground-shaking announcements heralding change are over; we have no big surprises yet to reveal save for whatever new and exciting model or project we’ve been working on. I hope you all share the excitement and anticipation for what lies ahead with the Grymkin and beyond because the best stuff Privateer has ever done is yet to come, and we’re going to be making it with you as part of our ongoing development process.

And speaking of CID and the future…

It’s been a little over two weeks since we launched Community Integrated Development—CID—and, perhaps just as exciting, since we unveiled to the world through CID the new HORDES Faction, Grymkin: The Wicked Harvest. I speak for everyone on the Development team when I say we have been blown away by the response.

The quality of feedback and the number of constructive conversations on the CID forums has provided a wealth of data for us to work with. And while what we’ve accumulated from everyone participating has been fantastic, what’s been most rewarding is being able to work in this final testing cycle alongside the WARMACHINE and HORDES community with a shared passion. Together, we’ve been able to groupthink and tackle some tricky issues (Bag Man comes to mind). There are still a couple of weeks to go, but I feel confident this new process has cemented an exciting new and awesome era for WARMACHINE and HORDES, one I believe will become just as much a seminal moment in the history of the games as was the launch of Mk II or the release of Colossals and Gargantuans.

And though there’s still plenty of road left to travel with Grymkin, I wanted to take time today to talk about what everyone can expect next for CID.

The first thing you might have heard about last month after the excitement of SmogCon (now Lock & Load Europe) is that Steamroller 2017 will be going through the full CID process after Grymkin. Our intrepid Organized Play Developer William Hungerford has gone whole-hog on this new version, and I know he is very much looking forward to putting it through its paces with everyone in CID. But I will refrain from stealing his thunder and let him tell you all about it himself in tomorrow's Insider!

Beyond Steamroller 2017, the next cycle of CID is going to offer some big opportunities. And by big, I mean huge…bases, that is. One of the major highlights for the next CID cycle is a reevaluation of our first huge-based models, the battle engines. For the last couple of months, we’ve been testing and reworking how battle engines perform on the battlefield because even with the changes in the new editions, we still don’t feel these impressive centerpiece models have hit the mark as perfectly as we’d like.

Because no preview is as exciting without spoilers, I thought I’d give you a little sneak peek at what you’ll be seeing when we introduce this rework into CID. First, we realized one of the biggest issues facing all battle engines is durability on the tabletop. So, many battle engines have seen a jump in damage boxes, with nearly every battle engine now having 30-38 boxes. In addition to increasing battle engine survivability, we’ve also worked to identify key roles for every battle engine in order to give them additional army synergy beyond of just destroying enemy models. My favorite example of this is probably the change to the Wraith Engine’s Unhallowed ability, which now reads...

Unhallowed - While in this model’s command range, friendly Faction undead models gain +2 ARM against ranged and magical attacks and do not suffer blast damage.

Another example of infusing army synergy into battle engines is reflected in new additions to the Celestial Fulcrum, which picked up two new abilities:

Power of the Stones - During your Control Phase, this model can leech fury from friendly Faction construct warbeasts.

Veteran Leader [Blackclad] - While in this model’s command range, other friendly Blackclad models gain +1 to attack rolls.

While this is just to whet your appetite with a small glimpse of what’s in store, believe me when I say there are exciting changes coming for every Faction’s battle engine. Beginning at the end of April, we’ll put the current reworked versions into CID in the hopes that with your help, by the end of the cycle, battle engines will finally take their place as the engines of war we always envisioned and you always wanted them to be.

But wait, there’s more!

That’s right, there is one more very important element to the next CID cycle. The final piece of that cycle will be an intensive review of the upcoming Bane Thrall theme force dropping in No Quarter #73. Not only will this give everyone a chance to have a hand in testing the Bane Thrall theme force itself, but we will also be putting all the Banes into the cycle for testing as well. One special note for those of you who pick up the Cryx Command book and notice only one theme force in that book. Don’t fret—the Bane theme force is your second one. However, we knew we wanted additional time with not only the theme force but with the models that comprised it as well, so we decided to keep them out of the book and reserve them for CID, where we could work with the entire WARMACHINE and HORDES community to make this iconic theme the best it could be.

If you haven’t yet joined in on CID, what are you waiting for? Visit cid.privateerpress.com and sign up today to take part in helping to shape the future experience of WARMACHINE and HORDES.

See you on the boards!