Update #225 opens new and exciting possibilities for your own crew builds even as it gives more options and variety into the hands of the enemy AI crew builder. We've also improved some of the difficulty descriptions to be clear where difficulty increases are actually increasing the cleverness of the enemy AI builders. Finally, we've made an important fix to the Crimson Defender and closed a story race condition with "Blood for Blood" Faen missions.

Thanks to everyone posting reviews and playing and if you enjoy the constant stream of improvements, be sure to tell a friend and post a review!

Crew Champions, Gear Up!

Update #225 offers some new possible paths for your design of combat crew and craft pilots by allowing you to equip a limited number of crew members to equip gear. As your captain increases in level, the number of crew who can equip gear increases as well, all the way to up to 6 high potential individuals. While this does not replace the need or value of using officers for craft pilots and as crew combatants, it increases the viability of exceptional crew members taking on these rolls. Within your crew, look for your best, brightest lights. First, keep them away from airlock duty. Then, equip them with some awesome gear and send them to battle!

Starting at level 5, you can equip your first crew member. At 8, 12, 16, 32 and 38 you gain an additional equip point. This means that by level 16, you could field an entire gear-equipped combat team with a single officer or run a sizeable craft fleet with gear-equipped crew pilots only.

To help track these chracters, we've added 3 new filters to the crew list – one for weapons, armor and gear. These filters show only those characters who you have equipped with a unique weapon, armor or gear or those that have had a special equip decision within a weapon locker. So, if you give a character special sniper rifle you bought from a contact or salvaged from a hive, they will show up here. But if you pick a combat character and manually assign that they should use a snubber over the default pick of a rifle, they will also show up here. Anyone using gear will appear in the gear filter, making it easy to find those crew who have joined this new echelon of crew.

Enemy Crew Builder Variety

The enemy AI that designs the crew to staff a ship has received some exciting updates with #225. As always, enemy crew builder intelligence is modulated by game difficulty, so some of these will not appear – or appear only rarely – in easier difficulty games.

The first big change starts to open the door for more exciting enemy boarding combat teams. Traditional, the enemy boarding team is a mix of Swordsman, Pistoleers and Soldiers but now the crew builder may decide to include Snipers and/or Combat Medics to mix up these teams. These are especially more likely on military ships that have more than 4 combat crew – a second boarding team or defensive team deployed.

The second change focuses on ship crew specifically, allowing for the enemy crew builder to consider Mechanics, Military Officers, Smugglers and Commanders among the crew ranks. These are only in consideration based on the enemy captain type (Smugglers and Explorer captains can include Smugglers but won't include Military Officers). These new additions cause some changes to the stats of an enemy ship that can be beneficial, but due to their limited number of slots, their impact will be felt mostly through the unique and new Talents they can use on behalf of their captain.

Finally, we did further increase the intelligence of high difficulty AI to make smarter decisions about both Pilot and Navigation dice pools and their allocation of Pilot and Navigator Jobs versus other options. Their pool allocation will be a little sleeker, leaving a bit more space for specialists when they can hit the 150% to 200% Skill Pool target comfortably.

Crimson Defender!

The Crimson Defender has long been missing a 12th small slot due to a minor data processing error on our part. We've resolved the issue and a new starting Officer Cabin has materialized from the void, bringing the Defender up to its fully operationally 12 small slot target.

Clarifying Difficulty

To help clarify the on-going difficulty changes that we are making, we've modified the in-game description of difficulties and custom difficulty to make it clear that as you increase the enemy challenge level, their cleverness increases as well. We've made many changes and improvements to the enemy ship and crew builders over the last year and at times, we've failed to make it clear that these AI improvements require a certain level of intelligence from the difficulty scaler to be used. Certainly, higher difficulty will result in higher statistic enemies, but it is generally because they are making more intelligent decisions about how to setup their crew and ship.

@StarTradersGame is out of drydock on twitter!

You may already be following us on Facebook and on the @TreseBrothers twitter, but we're now sharing news, sales, gameplay vids, guides & tips from the forums & discord, streams, memes, and more on Star Traders' own twitter account: https://twitter.com/StarTradersGame

Cyber Knights: Flashpoint

Pilot a fleet of battle drones, lead a pack of cybernetically enhanced war dogs, mind-meld with a cybercat, charge your nano-blade, get your arms replaced, stalk the night of New Boston as a cybernetic mercenary-beast of 2231. If you like these words, wishlist Cyber Knights: Flashpoint today.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210/Cyber_Knights_Flashpoint/

v3.0.95 - 9/1/2020

- Limited number of crew members may now equip Gear based on Captain Level (starting at level 5)
- Gear-wearing crew are better candidates for joining combat teams or flying craft
- At highest level, 6 crew can equip gear (progression, 5/8/12/16/32/38)
- Added 3 new crew list filters – Weapon/Armor/Gear which show any officer or crew with custom equip
- Military Enemy AI may add Snipers and Combat Medics to their boarding teams
- Depending on their type, enemy AI can seed their crews with Mechanics, Military Officers, Commanders and Smugglers
- Enemy AI at higher difficulties better balance their allocation of Pilots and Navigators
- Clarified difficulty / custom difficulty description to be clear where AI cleverness is increased
- Fixed major balance bug with Crimson Defender, missing 12th Small Slot (Officer Cabin) re-instated!
- Fixed inconsistency with display of ransom value in ship ransom with Talents and Traits
- Fixed race condition between Duel of Assassins and "Blood for Blood" mission that could cut story short