In this patch, you can max your perks BEYOND level 3, finally enjoy VSync, and take dozens of buffed cards and perks for a spin.

We've been super stoked to see all the positive feedback around the new perk system. But of course, there are also issues we want to address and with your help we'll make things just right. As we mentioned before, a revamp changes a lot of things. And we're now starting to tweak those that need to be tweaked. We also took the time to buff some ugly ducklings all over the game. Our ultimate goal is to make every king, card, decree, and perk equally relevant or die trying.

NEW FEATURES:

• NEW RAINBOW PERK: Nationalist (All adjacent king perks are applied +1 time)

• The game now supports VSync (toggle it on in the options menu)!

• Misclick prevention: if you click the wrong card and move your mouse away, while still holding the button, the selection won't compute (finally!)

BALANCING/FIXES:

• King I difficulty was attenuated (enemy stats will now scale a little bit slower)

• Base cards gained a small initial stat buff to improve early run balancing.

• Base cards now get a little attack speed boost when leveled up.

• Vampirism enchantment now properly works with all troops.

• Echoform and Slime now properly load very high stats when duplicated.

• Very high stats are now properly loaded after saving & quitting (please start a new run)

• Eyeglass decree now gives troops and towers 20% raw critical chance.

• Bunker decree is now working properly.

• Critical chance boosts now work with troops that had 0% critical chance.

• Treant base initial damage was doubled. ːsteamthisː

• Trapper troop was considerably buffed. ːsteamthisː

• Imp troop damage was buffed. ːsteamthisː

• Mangler tower attack speed & level up stats were buffed. ːsteamthisː

• Archer troop attack speed & level up stats were buffed. ːsteamthisː

• Hunter perk now gives Trappers +20% damage (was 10%) ːsteamthisː

• Bellicist perk now gives troops +10% critical chance (was 5%) ːsteamthisː

• Berserk perk now gives Nothing troops +10% attack speed (was 5%) ːsteamthisː

• Recruit perk now gives Soldier +10% to all stats (was 5%) ːsteamthisː

• Sorcerous perk now gives Warlock +20% attack area (was 10%) ːsteamthisː

• Butcher perk now gives Mangler +20% attack area (was 10%) ːsteamthisː

• Explosive perk now gives Bomber +20% attack damage (was 10%) ːsteamthisː

• Goon perk now gives Thieves +20% critical damage (was 10%). ːsteamthisː

• Castellan perk is now working properly with Pagoda and Stronghold.

• Admiral perk is now working properly.

MISC:

• Critical chance now displays "%" properly in the tooltip.

• Added a small delay to the arrows from Sentinel perk, making the doubling visually perceptible

• Fixed a bug that caused a crash if you had Warden perk level up your castle beyond max level.

• Localization fixes in Ukrainian, Turkish, and Portuguese

*Reminder: you'll unlock the 4th Rainbow perk by getting a king to level 12. If you're already past level 12, the perk will already be unlocked after downloading this patch.

These tweaks are an important first step in this new journey of balancing. The new Rainbow perk (Nationalist) is intended to add even more build options and address feedback from players who missed the ability to further boost individual perks. With this perk, the max number of points you can have on your board more than doubles compared to the original system, allowing you to max out key perks BEYOND level 3 while also encouraging strategic thinking to make the most out of your board.

You'll notice how ONE single Rainbow perk can exponentially increase your options, and hopefully understand why we're not throwing everything at you at once! For now, we feel we're getting to a sweet-spot of max perk points in a single board. The next perk addition will pivot from the additive-support formula and bring some game twisting mechanics to the table.

It's also important to note that the more perks we add, the fewer "meta" strategies we want there to be in the game. Experimentation is the soul of 9 Kings and we want to make the perk system live up to that.

Anyway: we'll keep tweaking numbers and trying to improve any system that might be feeling underwhelming compared to others. We started off with the least used perks from the current patch, but know that we'll consider revamping some entirely, while, of course, adding more.

As always, after downloading the patch, please start a new run, as your previous run won’t have the updates stored and they may cause conflicts. If you experience any issues, please email us at https://report@sadsocket.com.

As we always say: the reason the game is EA is so we can build it together. We're listening and improving every day. So if you're REALLY angry at us because of something we tweaked, we hope you give us your feedback and some time to address it before hating us forever (!!!). Change will always make some people happy and some people angry, but we promise you we'll keep chasing that sweet spot for everyone if you give them a shot!

Expect more balancing and QoL updates in the upcoming days. The 8th king is coming soon!

Please join us on Discord[discord.gg] and Reddit. You can also find the 9 Kings wiki[wiki.hoodedhorse.com] page here for information on the game! Love, Sad Socket team

Love,
Sad Socket team

This patch might be the most meaningful one we've ever dropped. We listened closely to your feedback, banged our heads on the wall for a month to come up with the right solutions, and the result is a total revamp of the game's meta-progression system. With 52 new perks for a total of over 80, and a huge design improvement.

We're no longer locking you into pre-determined upgrades per king. You now have 9 slots. And you can use them in whichever way you want. The idea is to bring the 9 Kings core design to the meta-progression system. It's a minimalistic dynamic version of the game loop you're here for. The new system can be approached casually if you just want to chill, but that can have a whole new level of depth if that's what you're into.

You will now have a limitless pool of perks to choose from, and they will be unlocked as you play the game. Some perks are universal, some are unique to your king, some are Rainbow perks. Think tactically and choose the best 9-combo for your strategy. We're starting with a total of 80+ unlockable perks and we'll keep adding more, and tweaking those that might not quite work yet.

Rainbow perks will twist the game in interesting ways - including your own perk board (like Expander in the screenshot). Once unlocked, a Rainbow perk can be used across all kings, like Universal perks. We'll start with 3 experimental Rainbow perks and we plan on expanding the pool very quickly.

By the way, old "Nothing" perks are now called Universal perks. This means that our dear King of Nothing now has his own unique perk pool like all the other kings.

The 9-level cap is now gone. The community asked for it, and you can now level up forever. Every time you level up, you'll unlock a new perk as long as there are perks available. After that, you can still brag about being level 999 to your friends. The required XP to level up was also reduced by 25%.

If you're new to the game: you'll unlock a new perk, randomly, every time a king levels up. The unlock system will alternate between Universal and King perks. Every time you hit a level threshold for the first time (level 3, 6, 9, and so on), you will also unlock a Rainbow perk.

If you're a veteran: those who've already played the game will start with one perk per level unlocked. All the perks you know are still available to be unlocked. You'll also likely have more perks than you did before. With the Universal pool of perks, the idea is to make the game less grindy while still keeping things fresh with the king-specific perks.

The game's core difficulties were rebalanced based on your feedback. On lower difficulties, first years got a little harder (Peasant difficulty is now equivalent to Squire, and so on). On the other hand, Endless Mode difficulty progression curve is now 10% less steep on all difficulties. King difficulty, the pure game experience, remains with a similar scaling, although you can now come up with more ways to beat it thanks to the new perk thresholds. It also means you can perceive the curve between difficulty levels with a bit more clarity (the gap between Prince and King being is now slightly smaller, for example)

The best thing about this rebalancing is that we're aiming to address two things we've been hearing from you: on one hand, it can be a little too easy to beat the core game on lower difficulties. On the other hand, some people feel Endless Mode gets way too hard too fast. By making the first years subtly more challenging on lower difficulties, we came up with a new progression curve that makes Endless years a little less abrupt. Don't be mistaken though: we're talking about 10%. It's still exponential ruthlessness. We'll keep tweaking everything according to the community's experiences. We are listening!

It took us a while, but we feel we finally cracked a balance between abundance and limitation. We truly believe that what makes 9 Kings special is that it forces you to be creative with a finite amount of resources (the magic number 9). But the 9 on its own wouldn't be any fun if it didn't enable hundreds of creative outcomes. We also really dislike the idea of mindless meta-progression. We want to value your time and make you feel stimulated, while giving you more agency. With this new system, we hope you'll see the 9-grid as a fun challenge, something that encourages you to explore, be strategic, and find the most meaningful perk strategy for your style.

As usual, here are the remaining updates of patch 0.7.91:

• X-Ray now works with base cards

• Slime performance improvement

• Duplicated units are no longer (wrongly) affected by Populate.

• Echoform/Slime will now properly duplicate extremely high stats (PENDING: HOTFIX INCOMING)

• The game will now properly load extremely high stats (PENDING: HOTFIX INCOMING)

• Ruthless can no longer insta-kill bosses.

• Optimized Rainbow army shader

• Dispenser projectiles are no longer underneath buildings (this dev wants to slap himself every time he sees a gameplay video of Dispensers in the last patch)

• Perk art was updated

• There's more coming very soon!

Anyway, we're very excited about this system and very eager to hear your thoughts. One of the biggest feedbacks we've got for 9 Kings was the lack of depth for the meta-progression system. And we agree! The game is in early access and hopefully we can keep building it together. We can't wait!

Please join us on Discord[discord.gg] and Reddit. You can also find the 9 Kings wiki[wiki.hoodedhorse.com] page here for information on the game! Love, Sad Socket team Steam Reviews: Your Feedback Matters We've been reading through all your Steam reviews, and we appreciate the feedback we've been receiving. We'd love to continue seeing more of your thoughts! It helps us know what to focus on for each upcoming patch.
Love,
Sad Socket team