 You there. You're lost. I can see it in your eyes. No home, exiled. I know. I've been there as well. Come with me and I can take you to a place. A place where everyone is welcome. All the disparate races of Panathor can come here. On one condition, you fight for our side. And you keep the greatest known secret to our world. You wouldn't believe me if I told you. This way to the north. It's not far. Hey everyone, it's Kyle Atmantic here today to give you a peek behind the curtain and a preview of the new changes coming to the Northern Alliance this July. One of the best things about the Northern Alliance is that it's a faction that takes humans, elves, and dwarves from all across Panathor and puts them into one list. That means that you've got the ability to sort of combine different play styles and different strengths that come with the inherent abilities of those races and put them together in the one place. The list currently functions in a way that takes advantage of both the frozen mechanic and wild charge. This means that you're able to slow down your opponent and then close the gap with wild charge. It was a really cool idea, but I think it could have been flushed out a little bit better. We know that the Northern Alliance is incredibly hearty. They're a race that wants to survive. They're fighting for a cause that most people don't even know what the secret and everything is behind it all. So when looking at them, you want to have a design philosophy that plays into everyone working together. Going a step beyond that, we look at the Ice King Hunters and we felt that these guys are in a really good place. It's a top tier unit. They've got fantastic stats. Really good in that Gladestalker range. They can apply their melee attacks and the ranged attacks all around unit. One of those absolute STR units in Kings of War. The frozen mechanic was what was interesting about them and when they apply that, it's great. It allows the enemy to have that minus one speed, but what else could be done with this? We felt that that could be leaned into more, especially from a thematic standpoint. So when looking at the half-elf berserkers, what was something that could be given to them? They would take advantage and have these guys work together. That's the whole philosophy behind the Northern Alliance, right? So what we did is we came up with a rule called Tundra Fighters. Tundra Fighters allows any unit that charges into an enemy that has the frozen rule applied to them to gain a vicious roll on their damage. So this is a way for these units to kind of synergize and work together. You might be thinking, well, how would that work? Because you can't shoot into a unit that you've already charged in the movement phase. That's where we came up with some other interesting design ideas to tweak these changes. So this presented an interesting design challenge. Obviously, frozen can be applied in the shooting phase. How do you take advantage of that with combat units? How do you get the synergy and the real fluff behind what Northern Alliance is doing and represent it in the rules? And that's where the rules committee came up with the chilling presence rule. This means that your units that have this, and I can give you a hint, it's the cold ones. Essentially, when they finish their movement phase, enemies within six inches then are going to have frozen applied to them. So it's a negative aura that applies frozen all over the place. This means that there is an overwhelming chance, especially in how you build your list and space out your units that you can apply frozen all across the board. And then those units with Tundra Fighters can jump in and get the vicious roll applied to their damage. It really helps boost up the kind of damage that they're doing. We know how powerful vicious is. So we wanted to give an incentive for players who wanted to work synergistically and to the fluff of the Northern Alliance. The next challenge that we had to tackle was that we had a wonderful hard plastic kit for the human Klansmen that didn't have the best rules in the world. And then we had the Hosscarls and PVC hard to source, hard to get in mass with fantastic rules. So that didn't make much sense. We wanted to take the two and kind of combine them together. So the Klansmen and the Hosscarls had been removed from the list and replaced with the human tribesmen with a hearthguard upgrade. Both of the units are still available in the list. We wanted to take the tribesmen and really up the ante with them. So now they're hitting on threes. They've got the crush one built into and base defense five, you can take them in a troop regiment or horde 25 attacks, you swap them out for the two handed weapon, give them crush two on threes. And I mean, that's just as gross as it gets. And then we didn't want to leave the Hosscarl players that had built these things up out in the cold. So what we did is we upgraded these in the regiment level, going from infantry to heavy infantry, allowing you to take the hearthguard gives you all the stats that you love. Plus, you'll notice the Klansmen and Hosscarls replaced with the tribesmen now get the tundra fighters rule. So it's a great way to synergize with all the new changes, all the frozen that's being thrown around. So not only are they better all around in every aspect, it's a way better way to approach the entire changing the list. If you know anything about Ronnie Renton, you know the man loves himself some dwarves. And when we were taking a look at the Northern Alliance and how we wanted to redesign them and come up with something new and exciting to put in hard plastic, he suggested the loud and proud it had to be dwarves. And we wanted to go over the top and do something really cool. So let's slap them on the back of Ravens and give them ice grenades that they can chuck into combat, do all kinds of nasty damage, swoop in, scoop out eyeballs and all kinds of nasty, nasty stuff. So that was perfect. It was the greatest prompt for a new unit ever. And we took it lovingly into the Frostclaw riders. This is a unit that has a very similar profile to Scorchwings. And with it, we wanted to synergize with the Northern Alliance and what the new frozen mechanic and how tundra fighters would work. So these guys have icy rooms. What they do is they apply the frozen mechanic into combat themselves. So any unit that they're in and they jump into combat, they apply frozen. So with a multi charge, you got you go into these guys first, you jump in with the tundra fighters as well. The tundra fighters then kicks in, you get the vicious role applied after the Frostclaw riders attack. If you want to, you can buy the ice grenades and throw them everywhere and stick around the edges because they get tons of speed, dwarves being fast on Ravens. That's fantastic. We've got something else for the dwarves that I think people are going to love. One of the changes that we wanted to make that will be universal in Clash of Kings 24, but applies to the Northern Alliance right now is that the dwarves are slow. It's a weakness in the army that's kind of built in, but it makes it really hard to synergize with things like elves and humans or frostfang riders, that kind of thing. So it's important to find a way to give them the ability to stay in the fight tactically. Dwarves are smart. They know how to follow orders. They're regimented. They wouldn't allow a weakness such as short stubby legs to keep them out of the fight. That's where we came up with the ordered march rule. This allows dwarf units to move at the double and still get a 90 degree pivot. This means that your infantry can keep up with everything else that's in the list. Even if you've got the new Frostclaw riders that are speed 10, now these guys are effectively speed eight when they're moving around. So you can even build an entire dwarf army if you want to from this one change. So it's a really nice way to keep everything in line and keeping the synergy going because everybody loves dwarves, but especially Ronnie Retton. The philosophies presented here are repeated all throughout the list. I'm just scratching the surface on how this all works, but you get the idea behind different speed mechanics with wild charge and ordered march, the new frostclaw riders being incredibly fast, as well as the new frozen mechanics with chilled presence, and then tundra fighters taking advantage of it. All these things are found in a variety of different ways in all kinds of units, including the heroes and the legendary options. And I think that this is the best iteration of Northern Alliance that we've seen throughout Clash of Kings or even from its launch. So I hope you're as excited as I am because this faction is really fluffy, really cool, works together incredibly well, and there's a lot of things to look forward to coming in July. So be sure to pre-order your Northern Alliance from your friendly local game store or manticames.com and stay tuned for even more rules previews, some tactics videos, as well as blog posts on the Mantic page. Thanks guys!