Knights and mercs - we're dropping another huge and free content expansion today - a new Era, the Ward War! This period of time sees great upheaval in New Boston as two major factions go at each other in the Wards, each calling for your Cyber Knight to heist and fight on their side.

We designed Cyber Knights to allow for years of expansions that would fit seamlessly into the game's existing content and features. With the proc-gen story system and Casting Director's ability to search for and match the right characters and contacts to fill any story role, a major content update like this just stirs and expands the pot that is already over-brimming with potential for new stories and twists with each run through Cyber Knights: Flashpoint.

If you are enjoying the continued stream of free new content and updates, please take a minute to leave a review to help our tiny team continue!

If you have any concern about your saved game or updates - see our diamond-plated Saved Game Policy below - no saved game is ever invalidated and all games get the Ward War immediately.

With the blessing of the New Boston Council and the UNA government, a multi-billion dollar contract has been handed down to the premiere New Boston milsec corporation - Brave Star.

The Ward War sees the milsec faction, Brave Star, facing off against the scrappy street gang, Los Zagales for control of Ward 4 and Ward 7.

New Boston[cyberknightswiki.tresebrothers.com] is housed under the massive, mile high dome that has protected the core of the city from the nano-fallout for decades. As the worldstorms settled, a new collaboration between New Boston, the megacorps and the UNA government saw the city break new ground on the "Wards" - multiple square miles of new housing and business districts outside the dome. Protected by towering walls, low range ionized shielding and monstrous 24/7 industrial blowers that waft any nano-dust up and over them toward the ocean, the Wards allowed opened the door for almost 2 million new inhabitants to immigrate and flood into New Boston.

A decade later - the situation in Wards 4 and 7 has reached a breaking point as the Los Zagales gang now completely controls the dilapidated, sprawling and ruinous slums and habstacks. The UNA and New Boston have joined forces to sponsor the Brave Star milsec corporation to destroy the Los Zagales leadership and restore law and order to the Wards.

Out-gunned and out-funded, the situation is dire for the Los Zagales. But it is just as tenuous for Brave Star, who will need to fight an asymmetrical battle and constantly show results to their UNA sponsors or risk having the contract pulled.

As a Cyber Knight and a major player in the underworld of New Boston, your services are in high demand by both sides of the conflict. Your Contacts will be vidding you constantly, as the developments in the struggle rage on. Brave Star knows the war can't be won in a straight fight and needs your help to locate and wipe out the Los Zagales leadership while the street gang needs you to blunt Brave Star's advances and hit them where they are not protected.

The Ward War Era is run on a score system - where each Faction is battling to reach 100% score. The conflict and events will move on its own, raising the score if you aren't getting involved. Whenever you do get involved by running a job or legwork, you'll help tip the scores for the Factions one way or another, steadily pushing someone toward a winning 100%.

The pay is good, the risk is high, and there are consequences looming for either faction. You will have to pick your opportunities to get involved. You can play both sides, you can pick a favorite, you can try to avoid it and just protect your friends - there will be winners and losers any way it goes.

The new Ward War Era comes with exciting waves of new content, let me sum up:

• Once the Ward War starts, new Contacts will start to filter into the game, as you become more familiar with the leadership on either side of the War.

• Brave Star and Los Zagales can offer 4 new legworks that are specifically tied to the Ward War.

• Brave Star and Los Zagales can offer 4 new proc-gen mission objectives where you're thrust right into the conflict, often in full battle mode and on the clock.

• The UNA and New Boston have given Brave Star full control of the skies over Ward 4; scout hovers and heavily armored military transports circle overhead constantly, always offering the threat of a dropship of Brave Star soldiers interjecting themselves unexpected.

• As you support either side in the Ward War you may earn new enemies! If you support one side too much, expect the other side to put a bounty on your head and hire Head Hunters.

• If you support one side enough, the leadership there can surface a Shadow Site mission against the enemy faction or against their corporate sponsors which offer unique and high-powered rewards.

• Supporting one side or the other can cause major ripples of Influence and Exposure through the Factions - forcing Contacts to be Compromised or rising to Power Plays.

• During the Ward War, your Contacts in Los Zagales or Brave Star also will see an option appear in their Influence Limit Breaks that let them increase their Faction's score - so feed your Contacts their Influence for all 3 meals and get cooking!

We've got a big discussion going in the Steam forums, asking what mission types you most enjoy and some related Qs about objective combos you'd like to see. We'd love to hear your feedback on this, so hop in and let us know: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1021210/discussions/0/809100133028451046/

In March, we released 7 translations for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint including German, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, and Italian.

We are now working daily on wrapping up the localization project for Simplified Chinese version of 《赛博骑士：闪点行动 Cyber Knights: Flashpoint》 with our translation partner and are excited to be sharing the game already with a small group of players who are testing it out.

If you know Simplified Chinese -

We are currently seeking players who have put in hours with Cyber Knights: Flashpoint who know Simplified Chinese and would be able to comment on and review the language's glossary and slices of translations in the game over the next couple of weeks.

If you are already versed in Cyber Knights terminology and know Simplified Chinese, please help us get the best result by joining our Discord (http://discord.gg/tresebrothers) and pinging @Liviana about it!

For other languages -

We are continuing to look at further translation projects based on wishlists received, so thank you all for expressing your interest, posting and sharing the game. We also plan to add support for community translations when modding support is released later this year.

Since you'll always be seeing a lot of updates around here, we want to reiterate our saved game policy so everyone understands our commitment to your games. No saved game will ever be invalidated by an update. All new content and features will be added immediately to all saved games (with the reasonable exception of New Game options). You never have to restart if you don't want to. This is a studio commitment that we have made and kept for many years and games. We stand by it. So do not stress about the deluge of updates that is coming your way - heist on my good heisters.

- New Story Era: Ward War kicks off any time at Team Power Level 5+

- Take a side in the ongoing conflict or ignore it - first Faction's score to reach 100% wins with big bonuses and penalties doled out

- 4 new Era-specific proc-gen mission objectives (Intercept Commander, Air Support Siege, Combat Escort, Crashed Scout Hover)

- 4 new Era-specific Legwork to assist either side of the ongoing conflict

- New opportunities to meet up to 10 new contacts on either side of the conflict - make enemies, friends and more

- Use your involved Contact's Limit Breaks to push the Ward War Era score higher for their faction

- Shadow Site opportunities can become available for helping either side of the ongoing conflict

- Head Hunters may be dispatched to prevent you from assist the other side of the ongoing conflict

- Added new Head Hunter, the deadly Lady Niner and her shotgun volley attack crew

- Adjusted timing on Specter from the Past storyline to prevent it from re-appearing again too quickly

Knights and mercs - we've got another update round here, coming with a bunch of fixes and improvements that have wide application. We're excited to upgrade more than 1000 proc-gen extraction points to pre-revealed, make some balance tweaks to every shotgun in the game, improve the Safehouse HUD funcitoning, improve physics handling of ragdolls and fix a heap of your F10s.

The relatively quiet update schedule and lack of content updates over the last week can only mean one thing - something big this way comes. Give us another week to keep cooking, we are excited to share!

If you are enjoying the constant, free updates, features and content - please take a moment to help our tiny indie studio and leave a review ːsteamhappyː short, long, funny - you can always edit it later.

Since you'll always be seeing a lot of updates around here, we want to reiterate our saved game policy so everyone understands our commitment to your games. No saved game will ever be invalidated by an update. All new content and features will be added immediately to all saved games (with the reasonable exception of New Game options). You never have to restart if you don't want to. This is a studio commitment that we have made and kept for many years and games. We stand by it. So do not stress about the deluge of updates that is coming your way - heist on my good heisters.

With Update #80, we've completed a sizeable project going through the thousands of possible exists for the now over 400 proc-gen combos (map X objective) that the game has to ensure that as many of them as possible have their objective pre-revealed even when there is a goal requirement blocking your exit. This helps your team plan their heist with the best intel you've got, knowing you've got to spike the CPU over there (etc) and then split and run for either the maintenance tunnel or access ladder.

The big change here is that the objectives now appear as "Locked" but you can click on the or select them and the camera will scroll to where they are and highlight them. Previously, in many cases they were simply invisible until you had completed the primary goal.

With this sweep we've upgraded 1142 extraction points to being pre-revealed. We have not completed 100% of the task but this covers a lot of maps and situations. Enjoy!

We've addressed an old balancing issue around Shotguns, which are one of the few weapon classes that don't have access to silencers. While they are still "loud" weapons that will be mostly reserved for combat operations, we have shaved down their firing noise by a nice % to help compensate - especially for the higher Power Level ones - for the lack of silencers in their kit.

Thanks for all the feedback on weapons on the forum - we're constantly watching, listening the looking to improve. As part of the on-going shotgun conversation, we are excited to confirm that Full Auto Shotgun variations are in the pipe and will be coming.

After the recent rebuild of the HUD and pushing all of the global stats to the right hand side, we've had some issues with the Team Power Level, Heat and Head Hunters % disappearing during specific screen transitions. The biggest offender was story events in the Safehouse, which could cause those 3 stats in yellow to disappear until you made another screen transition, such as opening the barracks or Command HQ. Glad to say this is now resolved!

^^ A good example of what we are trying to avoid!

On some OS and GPUs, ragdolls were still being very wild. Sometimes, they might decide to fly 40m into the sky or just go stretchy and bounce across half the map. This was caused by differences in how physics were being interpreted and the speed of different machines letting the physics system simulate faster or slower. We've made another round of improvements here to hopefully clamp down on issues and to ensure that the ragdolls have a better, consistent look on all platforms.

We fixed a big mountain of very important F10s this week, helping to stem the flow of reports from the active community playing every day.

• Prox-mines that were switched over with Kill Switch were not applying their full damage to enemies, often doing very low values. This has been resolved and they now go BOOM correctly as well as stealing the enemy turn.

• We've improved navigation on the mission maps to make them more friendly. Previously, you could only click on the glowing shape on the map to select the node, but this led to an enormous amount of misclicks where players were clicking on the bubble but without any result. We've improved the UI here to allow clicking on the data bubble to select the node as well.

• We fixed an old issue with two crafted armors that were very similar possibly showing up as duplicates in your equipment screens.

(^^ An early build, showing some text in Simplified Chinese and the game font)

When we announced and launched our first set of languages - we always knew that if things went well, we would start to work to expand that localization footprint. Today we are excited to share that we have started the localization project for Simplified Chinese version of 《赛博骑士：闪点行动 Cyber Knight: Flashpoint》 with our translation partner.

If you know Simplified Chinese -

We are currently seeking players who have put in hours with Cyber Knights: Flashpoint who know Simplified Chinese and would be able to comment on and review the language's glossary and slices of translations in the game over the next couple of weeks.

If you are already versed in Cyber Knights terminology and know Simplified Chinese, please help us get the best result by joining our Discord (http://discord.gg/tresebrothers) and pinging @Liviana about it!

For other languages -

We are continuing to look at further translation projects based on wishlists received, so thank you all for expressing your interest, posting and sharing the game. We also plan to add support for community translations when modding support is released later this year.

- Upgraded over 1000 extraction points in proc-gen missions to being pre-revealed for better early mission planning

- Reduce firing noise radius for all Shotguns at all Power Levels by some %

- Fixed issue with Prox-Mines converted by Kill Switch doing too little damage to enemies

- Fixed issue with Security Camera spotting a dead body that should have been blocked by Refract when reloading a level

- Fixed issue in safehouse where Heat and other stats disappear from HUD after running a dialog

- Fixed issue where reloading a level could result in the loss of AP/MP granted by cybernetics

- Improved click-ability of mission node map - clicking on the text bubble now also highlights the node

- Fixed issue with duplicate armors appearing in equipping screen when there were very similar armors with different intrinsic properties

- Improving ragdoll implementation, reducing crazy behaviors sometimes

- Improved main menu language dropdown to avoid languages going "below the fold" and hard to spot