I'm quite excited seeing our small team putting together this update, so I wanted to share some tidbits, and recap on the state of the crusade. This is our development team right now.

• Yes, we've been working on a game update since the new year!

We're small, so we take a little more time, but we're still working.

• Yes, our Workshop is still en route

I managed to grab time from our Art Director for the documentation, and requirements to our complex customization system.

• Combat balancing

Some people say, this route will ruin the game, other call him, the Stig.

• Yes, new campaign series

The team working on campaigns have come up with some great ideas besides simply new ones. We have to patch to get them out but they are getting ready.

• Yes, new and modified maps

If you follow the public test server and the official forum threads on public testing, chances are you've encountered them. We're also playing around with some of the ideas we've mentioned before, I stickied an example in the forums, where you can vote.

• Our partners and Games Workshop have scheduled promotions.

  We'll have our discounts and special promotions with our partners, where you can get friends and yourself good stuff at massive reductions. All for the greater good of more blood.
I, of course, can't tell you when or where this is happening but like in the movie, "there will be bloody discounts".

The game update progress

We should have this ready within the month, depending on our process, public testing, and the general schedule of some promotions.

Much of it is already in public testing but here is a brief overview, where I try to avoid spoilers. However, if you are active in our public testing, you know this already.

That's because we've been changing how we work with a smaller team, so everything we do and test pretty much ends up on our public test server directly in incomplete states, some of it won't even go out based on feedback.

But I also think this gets people even more involved early in the process of creating a game update. While we are fewer and are all doing more jobs than before, we do read, although our capacity to respond is far less.

So remember, what you see isn't necessarily what you'll get. In fact, chances are it's only the beginning of iterating on ideas we can easily implement. That all being said - this is what's being worked on. What makes it into this patch, remains undetermined.

Note: The Workshop is not part of a patch, nor does anything not mentioned here mean that something isn't coming. We're simply still deciding. And we want a patch out fast.

• Maps and modes

Multiple! We're doing new maps that are using our modular system, we have some redos of maps, we have refitting of maps where we put a new game mode, move the captures around or cut them up, and one game mode might make it in. What mode we try out after this remains to be seen, as we still have the prototypes, and we can fit some of them on current or refitted maps. Don't keep your hopes up, there will be more maps than modes. Yes, I know battle royale would be great, but we'd have to do our own flavor, and this isn't as simple as it sounds.

• Items!

We're well beyond 10 new items right now, probably will be quite a bit more.

• Combat balancing

Currently, the overview is vehicle health to be more epic, melta bomb changes, boltguns and their attachments, Veterans immunity to one shot, Poison resistance consistency for Vets/Heroes, Stream of Corruption, Lash of Slaanesh, Blight Grenades and Twin Linked Avenger Shuriken Catapults. This is not everything.

• New campaign series

It's in the process and until then, we have scheduled the continued re-run for bragging rights and RTC. It's also new for the new players, so let's not forget, something for more new blood is a good thing, even though you've seen it 17 times before ;)

Adding heroes to the DLCs and simplifying them

We're very likely to mess around and simplify the DLCs, the prices of DLCs and packages, and what they contain.

Why? We all want fresh blood, and that's required for the long-term survival. We've outlived many games thanks to you, so my main concern is of course how to make it up to you long-term players that bought all the billion variations of packages way back before we even arrived here.

So if you have suggestions on how you'd like to see this, throw it on the official forums. No, not on Steam forums or comments on this post. Our official forums is our official place, where we interact. With less time on our hands, less time is spent reading everything else I'm afraid.

But to start it off, we'll be adding the Hero to the warlord faction DLCs, they might even become the only faction DLCs moving forward, and we'd reduce the prices so the built-in discount is even greater for a new player.

The same could apply to either the current Squadron and Imperium, and maybe a new "Imperium" price would be a lot more.

Note of course, we're still free to play and the workaround link is on our steam page. I think we'll be able to get that fixed this properly this century, give or take.

Let us know your ideas, how to make it up to you that stay with us and enable us to stay alive, and how we can make even more interesting packages for newcomers, which is in all our interest. More dev money for the dev team!

Customer Support, help and harassment

If you need any help at all, even just bought something wrong, or now a Hero is in a DLC and you had also bought it, check out our customer support. They are always happy to help.

As always, the policy is, you get the RTC back, and if it's an item you bought before and haven't received, you get the RTC and the item when it's introduced. This is important in relation to changes to DLCs.

If someone is griefing, harassing you, or simply being obnoxious and should not be part of our community, this is also what customer support is for. They are the only ones that deal out long term and permanent bans, including VAC bans.

Yes, getting permanently banned on the forums or any of our official channels, will get you permanently banned in the game, if you fail to follow the terms of service and EULA. Those of us left, especially the players, prefer clean headshots from you rather than impotent venom and toxicity.

We keep this separation of Church and Imperium so that it's clear, you can contact them about anything, and they have records what has happened to your account before, we have tons of data, chat logs, anti-cheat, and even if serious enough, we contact Steam for cross-connecting accounts. Steam doesn't like fake accounts used for abuse.

Our merry bunch of Customer Service can be contacted here:
https://support.eternalcrusade.com/hc/en-us

Join us on the public test server

That's it for now, and we'd love to see you during the public test we schedule on the test server. We're looking in to setting up the entire test branch as a separate install now, it's technical setup that prevents us right now from doing it in our pipeline with Steam but we want to do it.

We love you all (mostly) but especially if you read all the way down here!

Team Hereticus