Patch #29: The big deck rework!

1.0 update is on the way but we still have time for more major updates before that and we couldn't be more pumped.

In this patch, we're making several meaningful design improvements based on your feedback. Our ultimate goal for 9 Kings is that you have fun no matter how you choose to play. This means we want to get rid of any F-tier cards/decrees and make sure every mechanic in the game is comprehensible.

With the data we've gathered over the last 12 months, we're now implementing big changes we believe will be undeniable improvements across the board, always keeping simplicity and fun in mind. We're also adding several new QoL features, implementing new balancing tweaks and addressing bugs as usual. TL;DR: New cards, new features, better gameplay. Let's go.

0.9.5 patch:

Card rework

Blood Deck:

• AdjustedOblation (NEW CARD)When you throw this tome into the pit, all your troops get +1 unit. Oblation's effect is increased by +1 whenever any card is thrown into the pit.

• Mangler: Manglers now summon meat trolls. Its passive mechanic remains the same, but the tower will now spit living meat balls that inherit all summon buffs and work as fodder for Cemeteries, Demon Altars, and other builds.

• AddedPagodaPagoda's ghost count now increases whenever a unit is destroyed. You will get 9 ghosts per level + any unit destroyed during your run. Pagoda Ghost count was always an arbitrary number and we hated that. Now you have total control of its scaling and can make full builds around it. By proxy, it also adds a whole new layer to cards like Sacrifice .
• AddedCemeterySkeletons now spawn from the Cemetery plot, improving armies distribution during battle, increasing Cemetery's effect clarity, and unlocking new placement strategies. And yes, it now officially summons Skeletons (aesthetic change only).

• Cemetery (pt. 2): When you destroy a troop plot adjacent to a Cemetery, it will now summon a unique Skeleton plot in its place. Yes, Cemetery's battle effect now works as a passive too!

• AdjustedBomberexplosion & pathfinding were heavily improved. Before today, all Bombers would usually explode together very near each other minimizing their total damage. Now, Bombers will pick different targets in the beginning of the battle so that their AoE is spread (if they reach the target without being killed, of course).

• Chaos Oblation (NEW): When you throw this tome into the pit, all your troops get +3 units per card thrown into the pit.

• Chaos Sacrifice now adds sacrificed cards' damage and HP to adjacent plots (instead of replacing).

• Demon Altar: Demon's Altar is just now just called Demon Altar.

• Bloodbath (NEW DECREE): whenever Oblation gives you any unit, also gives that troop +1% damage.

• Butcher (NEW PERK): Manglers get extra damage per sacrificed unit.

• Oracle (NEW PERK): Oblation starts with +1 effect stack.

• Blood Money (QUEST): you now start with two Embalming stacks.

Progress Deck:

• Recycler (NEW): Every time you throw a card into the pit, adjacent plots get +2% damage and HP per level.

• Reinforce got a full rework. It now gives you +2% HP per second during battle. And heals beyond max HP. It's a card that comes to fill the void left by Vampirism, but offers a much more tangible (and objectively better) buff.

• Converter now gains +1 ray per level.

• Mothership movement speed was slightly increased. Leveling up now increases movement speed.

• Lab Rat initial stats were buffed.

• Lab Rat chain effect is now also triggered by Patronage.

• Overhaul number of current level ups now is updated in real time in the card description.

• Junkyard (NEW DECREE): Adds 9 random trash cards to your hand.

• Futurism (DECREE): it now allows all troops to level up up to level 99.

Stone Deck:

• Wallmaker now gains +10% HP every year its on the field. Initial HP was slightly decreased.

• Trebuchet projectiles now deal AoE damage, making it substantially stronger. FXs are also much cooler now.

• Trebuchet no longer wrongly targets Pagoda's ghosts.

• Cauldron now gives 3 stacks of poison per level instead of one.

• Trapper base stats were increased.

• Ballista projectiles are now stopped by walls.

• Brickmaster (DECREE): It now doubles the HP of all buildings that have HP.

Greed Deck:

• Beacon: it now also increases movement speed.

• Vault: it now automatically levels up every year.

• Mercenary: Mercenaries now cost 9 gold per unit (instead of 15). Card's base stats were nerfed.

• Midas Touch now displays a gold splash when triggered in battle.

• AddedSpeculation (DECREE)this is a new decree that increases the level cap of Vaults to 99.

Rainbow:

• Obelisk starting stats were buffed.

• X-Ray now works beyond max level.

• Osmosis now give +30% to all stats.

• Ogre now gets empty plot buffs from locked plots too.

• Diffracting a Golem will now give you twice as many cards.

• Patronage now also triggers the Lab Rat chain effect.

Other Deck Improvements:

• Nothing: Scout Tower now shoots one more projectile per level (3 > 6 > 9...)

• Nothing: Scout Tower no longer wrongly targets Pagoda's ghosts.

• Nothing: Twinshot decree now doubles the amount of projectiles instead of adding +1.

• Nothing: Freshmen decree can now be picked 3 times.

• Spells: Spire's damage was halved and attack speed was doubled. This ensures a more continued stream of healing for troops and better scalability for the card. You can now also view healing numbers (see QoL).

• Spells: Spires now trigger pop-ups showing healing numbers during battle.

• Spells: Abrakadabra now makes frogs wander aimlessly instead of marching towards your base.

• Spells: Static Fields is now called Tempest (to avoid any confusion with Static).

• AdjustedNomadsDragon's Den attack area and damage were substantially increased.
• FixedTimeFixed the critical % of Warper minions.
• AdjustedNatureBoar base HP was slightly decreased.

• Nature: Horticulture decree now adds +2% HP per stack.

• Bargain is now a universal decree.

• Rebirth now gives you +3 lives beyond max lives.

Battle pathfinding

In this patch, we've drastically improved battle pathfinding! Troops will now be distributed more evenly on the battlefield and "clusterization" of troops will occur much less often. Troop placement before the battle begins was also heavily improved. This not only makes battles more aesthetically pleasing but also drastically improves clarity and balancing.

Game optimization

Enchantments like Static and Smite were considerably optimized. Invisibility and targeting are more efficient. Battle FXs were also considerably optimized.

Trash cards

We created a proper "trash card" type. This category will nest cards like Broken Cabulators, Temp Nulls, Broken Gachas, Spare Change, and the new Bone Pile.

Tutorial revamp

If you're reading this, you probably already know how to play 9 Kings. But let your newcomer friends know the tutorial has been completely revamped! It's now much more detailed, accessible, and overall... it just looks better.

The Pit

The pit is something that's been awfully underused until this patch, and we believe the new cards we're adding today will create whole new strategies to play the game. You can expect more updates where we'll add decrees and other mechanics to make it an interesting play style for those who want to test it out.

Gameplay clarity

• If you hold an upgrade card on top of a card placed on a plot, you'll now see which stats/effects it will increase.

• If you hover over a card's name, you will now see a preview of that card.

• Tome effect preview visuals were considerably improved.

• If you hover over a troop's Enchantment icon, you'll now see the effect of the enchantment.

• Decrees like Smithy, Horticulture, and Kintsugi now change the numbers in the description of the cards they affect.

• Perks like Patron, Gardener, and Aggressive now change the numbers in the description of the cards they affect.

• Building/Tower tooltips now display projectile count, effect stacks, and summon speed.

• Building/Tower tooltips now display projectile count and effect stacks.

• Added extra stat pop-ups that were missing.

QoL

• Clicking anywhere during the end stats screen will skip the animation.

• Options screen total revamp!

• Card text now has dynamic number highlights for clarity.

• Blessing warnings are now faster.

• Improved UI controller/keyboard navigation in the perk and multiplayer screens.

• Improved pause screen interactivity

Fixes

• FixedMultiplayerFixed meaningful client-server connection issues. This will make sure players will no longer lose rank points unfairly if certain glitches occur during their runs.
• AddedMultiplayerAdded a safeguard to prevent occasional softlocks when you lose a life during late game high-processing battles.

• Multiplayer: If you lose in year 32, the leaderboard now gives you the proper rank points.

• Added some safeguards to prevent the infamous "ghost boar" bug. Please keep us posted on this one.

• Fixed stat calculation after Migrating or Echoforming plots with very high troop count.

• Fixed a glitch that caused the pause screen to overlap with your cards when coming back from the Compendium screen.

• Several localization fixes.

• Fixed minor UI glitches.

Hotfixes (0.9.5.3)

• Nerfed enemy Bombers.

• Increased Executioner and Lab Rat initial stats.

• Fixed a bug that caused the game to break when Illuminism leveled up a Portal to level 3.

• Fixed Mangler plot stats on all quests (i.e., Slaughterhouse).

• Fixed Mangler/Amplifier interactions.

• Fixed stat preview icons and numbers.

• Added move speed to Mangler tooltips.

• When you Randomfy your base plot, your new base card will be added to your card pool.

• Fixed stat calculation when you Randomfy a plot that had already been Randomfied.

• Card preview size in descriptions was increased.

• Fixed Trebuchet SFX volume overlap issue.

• Fixed some dynamic text interactions.

• Fixed localization issues (i.e., Rebirth decree).

• Inverted icons on card preview to match in-game design.

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 report@sadsocket.com

Dev notes:

On the blood deck:

Our main goal with those changes is to make sure that the Blood deck has better synergies within itself, enabling new potential strategies while also offering cards that can be valuable to any other king.

Oblation is a very cool card that will help make the pit a more interesting mechanic throughout the game while also creating very strong synergies with the King of Blood and other decks. We're also excited to see new destruction strategies being explored with the new synergy with Pagodas and the passive mechanic from Cemeteries.

Important: Oblation is replacing Vampirism. After studying a lot of data, we realized that Vampirism was not an effective card and also didn't really integrate well into a diverse set of builds, like we want all cards to. Long story short, a healing card wasn't really matching with a death-focused deck. We're adding a new Enchantment to fill the void left by Vampirism, and don't worry: Vampires might still make a come back with a more interesting design in another form.

On the Progress deck:

We paid close attention to the community here and learned that Precision was the least used card in the game as of today. We believe that the current decks lack proper combos to make it work, making Precision loose in a deck that doesn't really synergize with it. That's why Recycler is taking its place.

We believe Recycler fills a few voids that are gonna make King of Progress more interesting: it enables completely new strategies (diversifying the meta), unlocks new synergies with pit cards and other kings, and adds one support building to his deck. We'll keep studying to implement new crit mechanics to the game in the future.

As for the old Reinforce: someone might say that the card was functional with Lab Rats, but that was its problem: its limited use cases. As mentioned above, the core idea behind 9 Kings is to make every card synergize in as many unexpected ways as possible, and we felt that previous iteration of Reinforce only led to dead ends. We will keep working to add a new Enchantment with an interesting passive effect to the game.

On everything else:

We've been trying to address as many community requests as possible in the last few months. The good news is that many of those were already aligned with what we had planned in our roadmap, which made our job much easier. There are still several improvements to be made, new cards and decrees to be added, and a few other surprises on the way. Please keep the feedback coming. We'll keep polishing the game, balancing everything, and making 9 Kings as fun as it can be.

Coming next

We're moving full speed ahead, and our eyes are locked on the 1.0 release. We'll keep working hard to bring new content and balance the game. We'll be back with more news soon. For now, make sure to keep sharing your feedback :)

Steam Reviews: Your Feedback Matters

We've been reading through all your Steam reviews, and we appreciate the feedback we've been receiving. Please continue sharing your thoughts, so we can know to focus on for each upcoming patch and make 9 Kings the best game it can be. It's really important to us!

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