Game Difficulty

Cyber Knights: Flashpoint (like other Trese Brothers Games) has highly customizable difficulty. There are six preset difficulties: Casual, Easy, Normal, Hard, Brutal, and Chrome, plus the option to create your own Custom Difficulty, adjusting the specific settings below to a combination of your choice.

You can change your difficulty mid-playthrough; doing so will flag your game with the "Flexible difficulty" tag, which in the future might impact the earning of some achievements.

Loot placed on a Mission Map is based on the unscaled Mission Power Level. In addition, the Power Level gained by the squad at the end of a Mission is based on the unscaled Mission Power Level. Unscaled means it is not affected by Difficulty modifiers. Changing the Difficulty of the game will affect neither the loot available in Missions nor the Power Level gained by the squad.

Save Options

Save options control timing of when you can save your game. Altering this setting can prevent save scumming, encouraging the player to accept setbacks and play from disadvantageous situations, sometimes creating the best comeback stories that way. However, the stress of permanent decisions isn't for everyone.

Free Save: Save whenever you want across multiple save slots. Reload at will and retry decisions as many times as you'd like.

Auto Save: The game will save at the end of missions and other critical junctures allowing you to retry larger chunks of the game, such as an entire heist that didn't go to plan. Manual saving is disallowed, sparing you from the temptation to reload after every missed shot.

Ironman Save: The game will auto-save but only keep a single save at a time, overwriting the previous save constantly. This allows you to pick up your game after closing the program for a break, but forces you to keep moving forward, accepting all of your mistakes and misfortunes and continue pushing through the NBZ.

Death Mode

Death modes allow you to modify game settings depending on whether death is a serious threat that excites you and builds narrative and tactical tension, or adds unnecessary stress to your relaxing gaming escape.

No Death: The Cyberknight and Mercenaries are unkillable. If they reach Bleeding Out, all subsequent damage will be treated as though they always made their death save and they just continue bleeding out.

Mercenary Death: Mercenaries can die if they fail their death save while bleeding out. However, your Cyber Knight will always pass death saves and your story will continue no matter how many times he or she is knocked down.

Cyber Knight Death: Anyone can permanently die, including your Cyber Knight. Upon Cyber Knight failing a death save, the game is over.

Security Tally

The security tally dictates how quickly the AI "passively" escalates each turn you're on a Mission. In lore this is explained by the fact that your quantum computer is jamming the usual level of synchronization guards and Drones would normally have, and the AI is trying to ferret out, with growing panic, what is jamming its signals.

All Security Tally disabled: The security tally does not auto-increase each turn. Furthermore security systems are not allowed to increase the security tally as an escalation action.

-1 Security Tally: Whatever the unmodified security tally auto-increment for a missions would be is decreased by one point, all the way down to +0/turn if the base tally were +1 tally per turn.

Unmodified Tally: The recommended experience for game balance. Security tally increases due to the security AI noticing quantum interference jamming many of its systems and delaying a standard security response. (This jamming occurs as part of every heist as a plot element; no player action is needed to initiate the interference.)

+1 Security Tally: Whatever the unmodified security tally auto-increment for a heist would be is increased by one point, vastly increasing the difficulty of missions due to the hyper vigilance of the security AI.

Speed Timers

Timers adjust the time between events in the game. Timers adjusted after an event has been added to your timeline will have no impact on those events. Only new event deadlines will be impacted by a mid-game change of timer settings.

Story Event Speed

The story event speed slider allows the player to alter how much time story events will wait for the player to recover and/or focus on them before they will pass on by due to the player's inaction. For example a contact with a limited window of opportunity to buy a fancy E-Rifle might have a default expiration date of 30 days (120 game turns). With a 90% Story event speed, this would instead allow 33 days to expire (132 game turns.) A slower story event speed will be an easier game.

Game Event Speed

The Game Event Speed slider allows the player to alter how much time desirable safehouse activities will take to complete. Examples include but are not limited to crafting time, how quickly you can heal from injuries, base construction time etc. A faster game event speed will be an easier game.

Combinations of Story and Event Speeds

Because events in Cyber Knights play with the tension of getting the things you want before a deadline is hit, you might think that increasing the story event slider and decreasing the game event slider by the same amount would lead to a functionally identical game as leaving both sliders unchanged. This actually isn't the case due to Heat. Regardless of timer used, heat dissipates at the same 1 Heat per 1 day (4 turns.) Furthermore, 30 day Hype Limit Breaks are not directly modified by the timer settings. This leaves four special patterns of modified game times possible:

Fast Game Event, Slow Story Event (Easiest)

This combination leads to a significant reduction in the difficulty of the game. You'll have tons of time to accomplish whatever you need to at the safehouse, and will have plenty of time for heat for burn off as well. You'll rarely feel time pressure to get all of the competing story events completed as you so choose. The singular added challenge here is that temporary Hype Limit Break bonuses will have fewer heists to be used on before expiring.

Slow Game Event, Slow Story Event (Easier)

This combination will be similar to the default game experience with the very notable difference of more heat being burned off per story event than you'd normally experience. This will be a bit lower stress than a game with neither time modifier applied. Temporary Hype Limit Break bonuses will have fewer heists to be used on before expiring.

Fast Game Event, Fast Story Event (Harder)

This combination will be similar to the default game experience with the very notable difference of having very limited time to burn heat off per story event, perhaps lending pressure to using more stealth than other games might be able to get away with. Temporary Hype Limit Break bonuses will shine, allowing more missions to use them on than normal time settings.

Slow Game Event, Fast Story Event (Hardest)

This combination is a brutal rush though short deadlines, costly mistakes from long healing intervals, and slow upgrades to the safehouse and crafting forcing the most judicious of strategic decisions while heat continues to build. Temporary Hype Limit Break bonuses will shine, allowing more missions to use them on than normal time settings.

Power Scaling

These options permit the player to tune the overall difficulty of the game either broadly or in specific ways.

Note that adjusting these factors in the middle of a Mission or Legwork will only affect future escalations and new reinforcements; they will not affect enemies or Matrix hosts which have already been generated.

Loot placed on a Mission Map is based on the unscaled Mission Power Level. In addition, the Power Level gained by the squad at the end of a Mission is based on the unscaled Mission Power Level. Unscaled means it is not affected by Difficulty modifiers. Changing the Difficulty of the game will affect neither the loot available in Missions nor the Power Level gained by the squad.

Power Level

Power Level is a flat modifier to how strong the Cyber Knight's team is expected to be given their successes in the New Boston Zone. An increase in the Power Level will make just about everything a flat amount stronger than a decrease in Power Level.

Matrix Power Level

The Matrix Power Level is a specific, flat challenge increase to how tough the matrix defenses will be in all settings. It stacks with the Power Level Boost option but is distinct from the generic Power Level difficulty modifier above.

Power Level Boost

Power Level Boost is effectively a multiplier on how quickly the game's difficulty grows, taking the modifiers from the difficulty menu and your team's Power Level before multiplying Power Level Boost. After multiplying, Power Level is rounded to the nearest positive whole number and applied to any mission you accept. Once a mission is accepted, its Power Level cannot be changed.

Monster HP Boost

This increases the maximum HP of all foes, whether Drone, guard, or anything else. This can have a major difference in game difficulty when a foe that routinely goes down in one well placed shot on an easier setting suddenly requires two shots, etc. On the other hand, you can decrease the HP of all foes to make even lighter weapons potentially one-hit kills against many foes. 15% HP is roughly equivalent to 1 Power Level worth of durability.

Legwork Boost

All Legwork has a percentage chance to succeed. Increasing this boost modifies that percentage upward, making them even more likely to succeed. Lowering legwork boost will make your legwork fail more often, or at least take more time for those legwork options that retry until they succeed. This can be a way to force strategic choices around recruitment and training to ensure you have traits that will give better chances at legwork success. Legwork Boost is multiplicative and the resulting product is rounded down. For example, a Legwork with a base 55% chance to succeed with a 90% Legwork Boost will result in a 49% chance to succeed, while a Legwork with a base 75% chance to succeed with a 110% Legwork Boost will result in a 82% chance to succeed.

Rewards

Mission Payments

Mission payments effectively controls how much money you get from most interactions. Your heist payouts, secondary objectives that give pure cash, and Cold Storage sale prices will all be adjusted by this slider. For a tough strategic setting where shrewd tradeoffs are the norm, set the slider to worse payouts. For an easier strategic experience where you can easily play with expensive equipment and goods, you can set the slider to be generous.

Experience Rate

This dictates how quickly your characters will level up and be able to train more skills. The more experience gained, the faster you'll level up.

Resistances

Negative Trait Resistance

This modifies the chance that mercenaries roll a permanent negative Trait when making a Stress Limit Break.

Wound Resistance

This is a flat bonus to your Wound Resistance applied to all characters. Note that changing this value in the middle of a Mission will not affect injuries which have already been taken because the resistance rolls have already been made. It will only affect new injuries taken after the change.

Armor Shred Resistance

This is a percent chance that, when a foe has rolled a successful armor shred against one of your characters, it is instead ignored. The enemy does not have armor shred resistance ever.

Death Resistance

This is a flat increase to your Death Save for all characters.

Economics

Equipment Prices

Dictates how much your contacts will charge you for equipment, and items etc. at the marketplace.

Safehouse Upgrade Prices

Dictates how much it costs to upgrade and remodel the safehouse.

Medical Prices

Determines how much it costs to treat Injuries and Wounds. (TODO: Does this impact surgery?)

Contact Service Prices

Other services from contacts will have their prices scaled by this amount. (TODO: Dos this include leverage?)

Crafting Prices

Determines how much material crafting something will require.