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• Patch Notes·11 Sept 2026Official

  Patch 1.1.3.1

  Update — Live Match Overhaul, Smarter Bots, Transfers That Actually MoveThis update is built around three things: watching a match, the bots who play it, and the transfer market that was quietly refusing to work. Full list below.Watching a live matchStatistics window between rounds. An HLTV-style overview of the map so far, with Rounds and Teams tabs, per-player cards with charts, portraits and real names under the nicknames, grenade and clutch tables, a kill feed with proper columns, and every round's result kept as it happened. Accuracy is counted from real shots fired.Jump from the kill feed straight into the replay, with the camera already on the kill. Trade kills are counted, and deaths after the round is decided are no longer lost from the record.A playback line under the match, in the manner of a demo viewer. The map so far is a row of round segments with the winner's strip under each, marked with every kill (headshots noted), plant, defuse, explosion and clutch, each with a tooltip. Drag the head anywhere behind the live edge and the match stops and shows that exact moment — bodies, sightlines, fog, the planted bomb — without re-simulating anything. Play runs it forward and hands the match back. Use the LIVE button, the > and 5-second buttons, arrow keys or Shift+arrows; the whole panel folds into a small tab and remembers your choice.Choose the speed a live match opens at — x1, x2 or x4 — in the new Simulation section of Settings.The dropped bomb is always on your radar when you watch the attacking side, as it is in the real game. It used to disappear into the fog with the man carrying it, leaving you to walk your own players past your own C4. The defending side sees it exactly as before: only while somebody alive can actually see it.An abandoned map is finished properly by overtime blocks, and the round that decided it is recorded before you leave.The LIVE button now reads LIVE in every language, and the button back to the statistics window is translated e...
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• Patch Notes·4 Sept 2026Official

  Patch 1.1.3

  Patch 1.1.3 — 4 September 2026A big one. The live 3D match now shows you what your players actually see, keeps a full log of every round, and plays smarter in the corners. Outside the server, the transfer market got its middle class back, the academy stopped being a black hole, and a long list of things that quietly cheated you have been fixed. Live Match SimulationNew: VisionPlayers now see through a 106° cone — the real game's field of view at 16:9 — instead of being aware of everything around them. An enemy behind a player is not seen, no matter how clear the line. A new vision button on the playback bar has three states: off, sight lines, and the full field of view filled in — orange for attack, blue for defence. The shape is cast the same way the engine decides visibility, so walls and smokes cut it. Fog of war: a new button hides opposing players unless someone alive on your team can see them right now. Watch the match the way your team experiences it.Players remember enemies they saw. A lone bomb carrier who watched three defenders walk onto A will now take the empty site instead of running into the crowd. Waiting players no longer spin on the spot — idle shuffling used to drag their aim around with it. New: Match LogA button on the playback bar opens a log window listing everything in the round: buys, pickups and drops, shots missed and landed, kills and assists, grenades and blinds, the bomb going down and coming back up. Resizable window, side-coloured nicknames, kills in red, scrollable across the whole area. Combat and tacticsShooting on the move now costs accuracy, and costs it differently per weapon. A man at a dead run is no longer as precise as one planted on the spot.Added signature "XANTARES PEEK" move that can only be performed by the players with skill and rifle equal or above 18.Star riflers perform the wide pre-aimed peek — stop at the corner, hold the angle for two or three seconds, then swing out at full speed. Every map now leans to one side...
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• Patch Notes·29 Aug 2026Official

  Patch 1.1.2

  Update Highlights Added Mac supportNow Apple device carriers can play our game ːsteamhappyːTactics: Choose Your C4 CarrierThe attack side of the tactic creator has a new C4 Carrier block: pick one of your five main-squad players (or leave it Random) to carry the bomb.The chosen carrier is shown with a small C4 icon right on his pin in the start-point editor and tactic preview — the icon stands on the spot where the bomb actually starts the round.While your picked carrier is alive, he is the one who retrieves a dropped bomb — teammates leave it for him. If he dies, the usual closest-player behaviour takes over.Imported and Workshop tactics, and AI teams, keep the classic random draw. Player Form ReworkForm no longer traps players at the bottom: a player in a slump who posts ordinary numbers now breaks even instead of sinking further, while a red-hot player has to actively defend his peak.Slumps heal about three times faster — weeks instead of half a season. Purple patches still cool slowly.A transfer is a fresh start: a newly arrived player gets his form lifted toward his baseline, so you no longer buy a slump along with the man.Existing saves are healed on load: players welded far below their baseline by the old math are lifted to normal slump depth and recover from there. Transfer Market: Overpricing Has ConsequencesSetting an asking price above 2.5× the market rate now silences the listing instead of attracting AI money: no guaranteed enquiries, no secondary suitors, no poach bids quoted from it.Loan listings are judged against the loan market fee for the actual term of the deal.The price tooltip now tells you when only lowering the price will help, versus when waiting for buyers' budgets might. Smarter AWP EconomyThe sniper no longer shows up with an AWP and nothing else: he only buys it himself when he can also afford armour and grenades.Otherwise a teammate who can afford the gift on top of his own full buy purchases the AWP and drops it, while the sniper spend...
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• Patch Notes·26 Aug 2026Official

  Patch 1.1.1

  Patch NotesA big pass over the live match simulation, tournaments, the transfer market and the Workshop. Match SimulationPost-plant: won rounds stay won. A defence with a man advantage (or with no attacker left alive) now walks back and defuses under ten seconds instead of running for the exit. The defuser is chosen by who can actually reach the bomb in time — bare-handed defuses are allowed when the clock permits, not only kit defuses.Retakes go to the right site. The team now heads for the site the bomb is really on, instead of continuing towards wherever it was already walking.Attackers clear the blast. The whole attacking side now leaves the bomb area under ten seconds (staying only to contest a live defuse), wounded players leave earlier, and escape spots are picked by real path time for each player. The round where a full team stands on its own bomb and dies to it is gone.Saves still work. Outnumbered defenders keep the classic close-kit ninja attempt, and if the defuser dies the job passes to the next player who still makes the timer — or the team leaves.Helmet no longer repairs your vest. Buying a 350 helmet used to restore body armour to full, which made it the cheapest and best armour purchase in the game.Buying a vest no longer removes your helmet. The shop kept stripping head protection, so half the squad entered rounds bare-headed and paid to fix it next round.Smarter armour pricing. A fully armoured player buys nothing, and a worn vest under a helmet costs 650 instead of a full 1000 — on every buy path and on the price list.Buy type is set before the round starts, so a round no longer opens on the previous round's selection. The forced pistol round of each half syncs too.Map veto behaves again. A broken condition made the first team ban a random map and threw away the second team's preferred ban. Both teams now ban their preferred map or make a sensible choice, matching how picks already worked. TournamentsGSL group matches are now Bo3. Existing career...
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• Announcements·26 Aug 2026Official

  We're at Gamescom, and Esports Manager 2026 is 20% off

  Hello everyone. Two things this week, and both are worth your time.★ We're at gamescomEsports Manager 2026 is on the show floor in Cologne from August 26–30, at the indie.io booth — Hall 10.2 | Stand F011g.If you're at the show, come and take a career for a spin. We'll also be at PAX West in Seattle, September 4–7, at indie.io Booth #316.★ And to mark it, the game is 20% off20% off from August 25 through September 8 — covering both shows. If you've been waiting for a reason, this is the one.★ The Major August Update is already liveOur biggest update since launch went out!Steam Workshop — browse, subscribe and publish straight from the main menu. Images, tactics and databases, no external tools.Club Academy — the academy is something you run now, not a background system. Sign youngsters on permanent deals or loans, promote them from the squad screen, and pay for all of it out of the operational budget.Cache — new map, with default tactics.Plus the loan system rebuild, retirement second careers, transfer clarity and the balance work from the patches before it.Read the full Major August Update notes here. ★ Not sure yet? There's a demoThe demo is on Steam and free. Run a career, see whether the sim clicks for you, then decide. ★ One askIf you've put time into the game, please leave a review. We read all of them, and a lot of what shipped since launch came directly out of them. Thanks for playing. See you in Cologne.
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