Cyber Knights: Flashpoint News

Update #100(!!) is here with full cRPG character creation for your Cyber Knight, and more. Enjoy 34%-off for the Steam Summer Sale!


[h2]New Game v2[/h2]
Desire for more fine-grained control over your Knight's stats has been a consistent drumbeat of feedback we've heard from you all, and now the new New Game experience is ready to offer it! You can now choose your own background, traits, and attribute bonuses for your Knight, dive into visual customization if you want, then select your starting squad members.

Backgrounds come with some inherent stat bonuses, open up new trait options for more, add tags that our Casting Director story engine uses to select storylines for your Knight, and offer context for your roleplaying, explaining how your character started down this path of underworld connections that eventually lead to becoming a Cyber Knight. We'll add more background options over time.

You then have 12 points to spend on your 4 Attributes: Reaction, Strength, Will, and Tech. You can spend up to 6 points on one attribute and no more than 5 on any other single attribute. Traits you select may also grant attribute bonuses.


Finally, Traits grant special stat bonuses and can grow over time as your Knight achieves limit breaks and can potentially choose trait upgrades as a reward (check the Cyber Knights wiki for trait upgrade stats). You can choose one background-specific trait and one Knight-specific trait during knight creation.

Thanks to all in our Discord who shared feedback on this system's preview! It's a great addition to the game, emphasizing the Knight's role as your main character. Experienced players will consider their long-term planned build to find the best synergies, and (if needed) re-spec their Knight's starting talents once they reach the Safehouse

You can also now view starting talents for your team members during squad selection, helping new players make more informed choices about if they want to start with an Agent EX or Vanguard, a Sniper or a Scourge, etc.


[h2]New keybindings for talents, Reload, Yield & Delay[/h2]
We've added new, configurable keybindings for selecting talents, reloading, and Yielding or Delaying in the initiative order. You can now by default press 1-9 to select your talents rather than needing to mouse down to the action bar, press R to reload, Y to Yield, or U to Delay.

We helped enemies go faster with the Skip Enemy Turn feature in update #98, now it's your turn! 😄


[h2]Controller & Steam Deck improvements[/h2]
This update brings major improvements to playing with a controller or on Steam Deck. We've smoothed out navigation, scrolling, screen transitions, and made it so that the Steam virtual keyboard now appears for all controller types.


We have a final round of Steam Deck testing to do and a new default controller configuration to set up for it in the next few days, and then we'll submit for Steam Deck verification. 🙌 If you're playing on a Steam Deck now, we'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions for the new default controller configuration.

[h2]Summer Sale deals, help us spread the word?[/h2]
It's awesome to reach update #100 already, and you know more updates (including another major feature addition) are right around the corner. If you're enjoying Cyber Knights, we'd love your help getting the word out about it! Please give the game a shout-out to your friends (maybe check your Steam friends list to see who's played similar games like XCOM 2 or Shadowrun) and suggest us to anyone you see looking for great games in the Steam Summer Sale!

Cyber Knights is 34%-off, a great deal for a game with as much replayability as we're building into it. We're pumping the sales now during EA, but will be scaling back discount %s as we get closer to full launch.

And if you're looking for more deals during the Steam Summer Sale, all our previous games are on sale right now too! Great time to pick up the Best of Trese Brothers bundle for more deep RPGs and tactics games to dive into:
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/37813/Best_of_Trese_Brothers/

[h2]v1.7.9 - 6/27/24[/h2]
- All new cRPG style Knight Creator in new game - select your background, assign attributes, pick your Traits, perfect your look
- Once you've optimized your Knight for your desired playstyle, assemble your team as usual and hit the ground heisting
- View starting Talents for your team characters (like Vanguard, Agent EX) to make more informed choices
- Tag now shown over the Command HQ showing the max and count of active tasks
- Major improvements and bug fixes to playing with a controller - navigation, scrolling, screen transitions fixes
- Steam virtual keyboard now appears for all controller types - Steam Deck, Big Picture Mode, controller in normal mode
- Added 10 new configurable keybindings for Talents (default 0-9)
- Added new configurable keybinding for Reload (default R)
- Added new configurable keybinding for Yield (default Y) and Delay (default U)
- Improved description of Scourge's Talent Reknit, removing all confusing language about duration
- Fixed some bad copies of SMG RapidFire that were for sale on market

Update #98 follows up on 2 major milestone releases - DOMINION and GO FAST - to continue to press forward on other areas of the game. Tonight's focus is on new enemies, improved enemy weapons and armors, new armor setup for enemy corporate captains and new varieties of reinforcement groups arriving across the faction lines.

Thanks to everyone posting F10s, posting feedback to the community and to everyone who left a review to push us up and over 300!

We're short on days but we still have a busy June ahead of us as we try to close out our (self-inflicted) challenge to close all these major milestones by the end of the month. To be honest, we've already hit 4 milestones which is crazy and we should be able to get #5 but the other 2 are going to slip into July by a few days to a week.



[h2]New Enemy Types, Clearer VFX[/h2]
Two new enemy types have been added, both armed with portable nano-capsules capable of releasing small fields of nanites that can form up to affect an incoming bullet just enough to alter its course from a hit to a miss. At the street and gang level, these Benders are cruder in their art, but the trained corporate Divergents boast a hi-tech and more expensive kit and are capable of putting up bigger Evasion buffs more often.

We're super excited to get on the track here of adding new enemies of all sorts - with new abilities, weapons and special moves. This is a great time for the enemy catalog to go from woefully shallow to something deep and much more exciting.

If an enemy uses an debuff against your team or a buff on their team, we've improved the VFX for these rarer and important events to be constant. They are light visual touches but they should help draw attention to the buff/debuff and can help prompt you to check the status pop up for the character or enemy to learn more about the specific effect in play.


[h2]Continued Improvement on Enemies[/h2]
We've continued to press this week on better progression across the board for the enemies in all factions. We've rolled out upgraded armor and weapons for a number of enemies as they scale into higher Power Levels and most notably, corporate Captains can now get armor as high as 3 Protection Points, making them significantly harder targets to take down, especially in Kill 3 missions.

Also, we've rebuilt some of the reinforcement groups that can be rolled for different factions, so expect to see a more varied response teams, mixing the new enemy types, some snipers and other enemies in where they didn't previously appear.


[h2]Improved Attributes[/h2]
In prep for the next major milestone of New Game V2 (Knight Creator) we've improved some of the effects of Attributes. You now gain +2% Dmg to Drones per point of Tech and +1% Dumpshock Res per Will instead of +1% to every 2 Will. Small changes, but helping to bring the Attributes into a tighter balance.

[h2]Improved Traits[/h2]
A number of Contact and merc Traits got a lift with this update. Thanks to everyone reporting issues with Traits via F10 and for the balancing suggestions as well.

• Merc Traits Grit, Scrappy, Bouncer and Bull-Built all now give nicer HP bonuses
  
• Contact Trait Detailed Oriented has gained bonus for buying Files and big Exposure Res bonus
  
• Contact Trait Calculating has been reclassified as a positive Trait
  
• Fixed bugs in progression with the MilSec Merch Trait
  

[h2]Custom Difficulty: -1 Tally Rules[/h2]
If you modified your custom difficulty setting to apply a -1 to the designed rate of Security Tally this did work except if the Security Tally was +1, in which case it was ignored. That was some silly nonsense which we have now fixed, it is always -1 unless it would force the Sec Tally negative and then time would start going backwards or something.

[h2]v1.7.7 - 6/24/2024[/h2]
- Improved enemy buffs and debuffs to more commonly have a constant VFX so they are more noticeable
- New type of street and corporate enemy - Benders and Divergents
- Benders / Divergents employ fast moving and flanking tactics, start with bonus Evasion and can buff for even more
- Improved armor and weapon progression on corporate captains - now boasting 1-3 Armor Points
- Rebuilt some corp, syndicate and street reinforcement groups to have more exciting variations
- Improved Attribute effects - now +2% Drone Dmg per Tech (up from +1%) and +1% Dumpshock Res per Will (up from 0.5%)
- Improved merc Traits Grit, Scrappy, Bouncer and Bull-Built to have better HP bonuses
- Fixed issue with Security Tally modifier in Difficulty; when set to -1 will now set level with +1 to +0/Turn correctly
- Improved Detail Oriented Trait to have bonuses to buying Files and big Exposure Res bonuses
- Reclassified Contact Trait "Calculating" as a low positive Trait
- Fixed issues with progression in Contact Trait "Milsec Merch"

Hello, Knights! It's time for another CKF Community Challenge. Our previous challenge was all about multi-classing and how you mixed and matched talents. For this challenge, we are asking you to leave your Vanguard back at base and take your Agent EX out on all missions you can.

There are two requirements for this challenge:

- You cannot take a Vanguard on any mission
- You cannot multiclass anyone into any Vanguard talents

For a true challenge, apply these requirements to a fresh start, brand new game. This is not required however, you can just pick up from wherever you are and just no longer use a Vanguard or any Vanguard talents via respec.

There also may be missions you cannot do with your Agent EX depending on their backstory - you have a few options for this. As there aren't very many, you can just skip them. You can do them without a Vanguard or an Agent EX. This will likely make them more challenging, but that could be part of the fun!




As always, we want to see and hear about your adventures tackling the challenge so here are some ideas for what we’d love to see:

- Screenshots of your squad and their talent trees
- After Action Reports of your missions, challenges you faced
- Tell us about the challenge posed by not having a Vanguard, were there any? Were you surprised in any way?
- Any other creative ways you want to share to tell us about your heists with your multi-classed mercs: memes, interpretive dance, gifs, etc



No matter what you choose to share, please share screenshots of your Vanguard-less squad on a mission!

We’ve opened up a discussion here on Steam in the General Discussion forum for aIl of your posts. If you post in our Discord, head to #agentex_challenge to join in on the conversation!

This major milestone unlocks a much needed option to increase the pace of play by skipping through enemy turns that aren't exciting to watch or are not directly impacting your team. This isn't likely the final improvement we can make to pace of play but it is definitely the biggest so far.

We've also added much needed step out mechanics for grenades as well as the Agent EX's Shadow and Glitch Talents. This greatly increases the value and versatility of these Talents and lets you use them with the same asymmetrical advantage around corners that you are used to with weapons.

Even better news, we're not done! June is still ticking and we've got 3 more major milestones to hit. Let's go, New Knight V2 and Crafting!


We did say the end of June would be BUSY! So here we are with back-to-back major milestones (DOMINION and now GO FAST), each a much needed feature that has been in the works and testing for months now arriving at last.

If you like this maniac pace of updates and improvements, please hit the review button! There is no better way to thank our team ːsteamthumbsupː


[h2]Skip Enemy Turns[/h2]
In any tactical game, playing at your own pace is a key part of enjoying yourself. For some players, enemy turns in Cyber Knights: Flashpoint have always dragged on, especially as there can be a lot of enemies who are walking, patrolling, hunting your mercs without finding them and this can soak up time. With this major milestone update, we've finally hit the goal of adding a Skip Enemy Turn option for you to decide how fast or slow you want to play.

With this new feature, whenever an enemy is taking their turn, a prompt shows above the enemy turn banner inviting you to skip ahead, fast forwarding the rest of their turn. If you do so (default, ESC or (B) on controller) the enemy's movement for the Turn will be rapidly displayed as a red movement destination and then their Turn will be over and on to the next thing!

If the enemy is deemed to have some important impact on the Turn, such as finding a body, spotting a merc or running into your Overwatch firing zone, the turn will not be skippable. Therefore, this fast forward feature is most helpful during patrolling, hunting and enemies sent by the Sec AI to investigate troublesome events on the map. Once the firing starts, there will be less skippable enemy turns.

We're excited to hear your feedback on the feature and how to improve. It drastically increases the speed of play but we could dig deeper and try to squeeze more if you, our players, are hungry for it. For example, we might:

• Add an option to skip every enemy turn possible without requiring you to hit a key. Without a doubt this sacrifices battlefield and tactical awareness for speed but let us know if you'd want this.
  
• Further improve the types of turns that can be skipped, including combat turns.
  

Hit us up on our Discord, the Steam forums or in F10s - you know we are here to chat and eager to improve, so let us know what you'd like to see to further polish this lovely new feature.
 

[h2]Step Out for Grenades, Glitch, Shadow[/h2]
We're very excited to make Grenades, Glitch and Shadow so much more natural to use. The days of having to risk an extra AP to step around a corner to throw your grenade are finally gone. With step out nicely integrated - just like firing your weapon - your merc will automatically step out around corners to get the best line of sight toward whatever you're targeting.


For Glitch and Shadow which don't bounce when they hit something impassible but are fully stopped, this is even more important to make the Talents useful at sharp angles around corners.

It's a huge improvement to bring all the Talents that rely on line of sight or throwing arcs up to the same standard so there isn't a confusion or surprises as you try to execute your team tactics.

[h2]Targeting Improvements for Slashslide, Glitch, Shadow[/h2]
We've improved the targeting rules for Slashslide, Glitch and Shadow to prevent them from being used directly on top of another merc of enemy. In the case of Slashslide and Glitch this prevents the ... glitchy ... result where you and the enemy are occupying the same space, clipping together. Assuming they survive! And for Shadow, this avoids the very hard to predict behavior where you can't be sure which way the enemy AI will interpret the Shadow wants them to look.

[h2]Sync Talent Upgrade 6[/h2]
We've added a 6th upgrade node for the Cyber Knight's Sync Talent which grants another +10m range. This will help for those players that know they like to split their team up but still want the advantages of the power strategies like Knight using Precomputed Advantage on themselves as their last action for the Turn, smashing a 25 Initiative for the next Turn and then using Sync to get the entire team to the front of the starting line for the Turn. That extra +10m helps everyone stay in the quantum rider's envelope and get those advantages.

[h2]v1.7.3 - 6/21/2024[/h2]
- Skip enemy turns by hitting cancel (ESC, B) - movement is previewed and skipped
- Skip enemy turns especially speeds up gameplay during enemy patrols, hunting and when moving to investigate
- If enemy is "in the action" their turns cannot yet be skipped
- Turns of enemies considered far enough away to have no impact are still skipped without camera focus (see options)
- Cornering / Step Out now works for Grenades, Glitch, Shadow, Slashslide
- Improved targeting rules for Slashlide, Glitch, Shadow and other Talents to avoid targeting directly on top of merc/enemy
- New Cyber Knight upgrade node for Sync Talents offers third +10m range
- Fixed issue when purchasing treatment where the availability of space at the clinic (1/2, etc) was not shown
- Fixed lock up after setting Flexible Difficulty in Safehouse
- Fixed hovers over NBS Cubes in Safehouse HUD

This major milestone unlocks another major part of the game's strategy layer as the New Boston underworld and its Contacts come alive in all new ways. It is great to see the roadmap design advancing with this - now your favored Contacts thrive while those you hate or work against wither.

Up until now, most of your actions have focused on their inward impact - money for equipment, Experience for Training, new recruits. And while you've been able to meet new Contacts and alter their Traits and Services through storylines, all of your game decisions weren't also echoing into the wider underworld and into your network of Contacts. Now, your decisions regarding Contacts, running or ignoring their missions, selling them high Rarity Accounts and following their storylines all have [i[outward impact and will feed their dynamic evolution - changing their Traits, Services and more in ways unique to your game.

Exciting times to be alive in New Boston! Let's check it out -


At the beginning of June, we threw down the gauntlet to ourselves to try to wrap up this ambitious set of roadmap milestones before the end of the quarter. We are smashing away now with the Agent EX recently out and the Contact Limit Breaks dropping today ... we're still in this fight with 10 days to go!

If you like our style of Early Access and how hard our team is working to deliver improvements, gameplay depth, new features and content to you on a very regular basis, we hope you will say "Thank you" to the team by leaving a review! It doesn't have to be long, and you can always edit it later.


[h2]Contact Limit Breaks![/h2]
Contact Influence and Exposure Limit breaks work in similar ways to your merc's Hype and Stress Limit Breaks. Through your actions, story choices, relationships and changing Eras of the game, your Contacts will gain and lose Influence and Exposure and as their Influence and Exposure top 80%, they will have have a Limit Break and change for the better or the worse.

• Contacts can upgrade their services - like the Power Level of Weapons, Armor or Items - that they sell. With this update, a bunch of services can now be upgraded by Limit Breaks, with a sum total of over 30 new pieces of equipment coming into the game. This will be a rapidly expanding area as well with new upgradable services coming online for other disciplines as well.
  
• Contacts can upgrade their positive or negative Traits. Your Partnerships can deepen, their issues and hardpoints can grow and worsen.
  
• Contacts can get temporary positive or negative Traits, like the Hi-Priority Trait that adds +25% to all mission payments for 30 days.
  
• Exposed Contacts might duck into hiding for a while, disappearing off the scene for up to 30 days and unwilling to buy or sell anything.
  

[h2] Accruing Influence and Exposure[/h2]
With LImit Breaks coming online, you'll naturally have more interest in the ways your Contacts gain Exposure and Influence. With this major milestone update, we've also plugged in some systems that were waiting for this day, so the new ways to get Exposure and Influence have come online:

• Completing missions for Contacts has always given Influence
  
• Mission secondary objectives have been expanded to include possible boosts to Influence (more on this below)
  
• Failing missions for Contacts now causes Exposure
  
• Ignoring a mission offered by a Contact now has a chance of causing Exposure
  
• Accounts of Rarity Epic or Legendary will grant a +1 Influence boost to the Contact you select
  
• More storylines include Influence and Exposure changes depending on how they play out
  
• Contact's Exposure Res Trait bonus directly reduces the % chance of gaining Exposure
  
• Contact's Influence Boost has been upgraded to be at % chance to double all Influence gains (huge!)
  

[h2]Contact Service Clarity[/h2]
To help with making this clear, we've improved the Contact display of services to include their maximum level. This lets you compare, for example, Dr. Ashe to Dr. Knife to see who is selling higher level medical gear or that your recently upgraded Gun Runner who got a cool Limit Break for gun sales is now selling the best weapons on the street.


This also works well with the Sellers filter we added in the last update, so if you see a Limit Break from Origami Joe for Weapons, you can go check out specifically what he is selling today.


[h2]High Rarity Accounts[/h2]
Consider carefully where your Epic and Legendary Accounts are sold these days as each one will add a +1 Influence bonus to the lucky Contact, whether sold for money or for favors.

[h2]High Power Level Mission Payments[/h2]
As crafting is cresting the horizon (in June!?!?), the late game economy needs work. In order to begin to bring the late game economy into balance, we're cutting some of the mission payments to help bring them inline. The $2m and $5m missions in the late game throw things a bit out of whack.

For missions at Power Level 5 and above (meaning, Team Power Level 5+ if you're on a balanced difficulty) the payments start to take a dip. Where you used to get $600K as the starting point for a Power Level 5 mission, you'll now start calculations at $500K. For PL 7, you've dropped from starting $2m to starting $1.2m and Power Level 10 went from a (whopping!) $25m to $4m.

Storyline bonuses, conditions, secondary objectives, Contact Traits all still apply, so these are just the starting points of the negotiation :D


[h2]Secondary Objective Reward Update[/h2]
With this major milestone update, we've improved the variety of secondary objective reward offerings, which previously only included extra money or extra XP. Now these secondary objectives can include gaining Favors from your Contact, additional boosts to their Influence or their Trust % with you.

This extra variety is great to mix up the rewards, and it plays to the new Contact Limit Break feature that is rolling out with this update as well. The next set of updates for secondary objectives fill focus on expanding the types of goals you are asked to achieve beyond "go fast" and "go quiet" with a lot of exciting other options that will add cool complications.

[h2]Item Sales in the Underworld[/h2]
For a little while, Item sales in the underworld have gotten pretty twisted around. Doctors were selling Grenades, Gun Runners were selling Bandages and no one was selling Bio-Recyclers or Dazzlers.

In prep for the Limit Break update and the ability for these sellers to upgrade what they sell, we've cleaned house and straightened everything out nice. We've also cleanly split Street Military Gear (sold by Gun Runners, Gang Bosses, etc) and MilSec Military Gear (sold by Corrupt cops, security officers, etc). These distinctions are especially important as each service will evolve differently as the Contacts hit their limit breaks, and MilSec Military Gear heads off into more techy gear while Street Military Gear focuses on more boom-boom grenades.


[h2]Fixed "Kill All Enemies" Objectives[/h2]
There has been a nagging issue with any objective that was to kill all of the enemies. Your victory was never registered until the end of the Turn which might mean you missed a secondary objective or just had to click End Turn a bunch of times. This is now resolved - your victory will be swift and it will be severe. Before the last ragdoll thumps on the floor, the game knows and is ready to award you victory.

[h2]v1.7.1 - 6/20/2024[/h2]
- Contacts now achieve Influence Limit Breaks and suffer Exposure Limit Breaks (either at 80%+)
- Contact Limit Breaks can increase levels of positive and negative Traits
- Contact Limit breaks can grant Temporary Traits (+25% Mission Payment, +25% Price of buying Files)
- Contact Influence Limit Breaks can upgrade services, like upgrading weapons sold or items sold
- Limit Breaks can add 10 new weapons, 13 new weapon mods, 4 new Armors, 5 new/upgraded items
- Contact Exposure Limit Breaks can send Contacts into hiding for up to a month
- Selling Epic or Legendary Rarity Accounts to a Contact will increase their Influence by +1
- Complete Missions and Stories with Contacts to increase Influence, more options to feed Influence are coming
- Failing missions or ignoring missions from Contact has chance of causing Exposure increase
- Improved Contact Trait bonus Influence Boost to be % Chance to gain extra Influence
- Expanded rewards possible for secondary objectives in proc-gen missions to Favors, Influence and Trust
- Reduced money rewards for Missions at Power Level 5 or above - bringing late game economy toward balance
- Fixed all Items Services to make a lot more sense and separated Street Military Gear from MilSec Military Gear
- Fixed issue with battle missions with "Kill All Enemies" not immediately ending when last enemy is dead
- Fixed issue with swapping weapons where second equipped weapon would not be shown
- Fixed issues with Leverages Lazy Shift, Bribed Shift and Unexpected Fly-over showing that they buff enemies
- Improved description of Legwork "Under our Thumb" to be more clear - +1 Favor per month
- Removed useless Reo-Flexsuit Armor from sale