You've given us time. And now, we're giving you the King of Time. The 9th king that will finally make 9 Kings to live up to its name, and that will unlock dozens of new combos for your strategies and unprecedented ways to break the game. Seriously, it's our most ambitious (dare I say reckless) update yet.

Who is the King of Time?

A multidimensional gentleman who travels through the ages in search of more kingdoms to conquer, the King of Time joins our roster to break time continuum and the game like never before. His kingdom lies in the fringes of time, somewhere between magic, sci-fi, and steampunk technology. Which one is it? Only time will tell.

A deck where timing is key

Time is one of the unfathomable variables of 9 Kings. And with this deck, we want to explore how far we can take it. Some cards reward you for being fast, some cards reward you for being slow, but most importantly: some cards will allow you to bend time and travel across the years.

Time traveling

That's right: you can now time travel. Thanks to the Portal card, you can go to a previous year while keeping your kingdom's progress, allowing you to relive key events in broken ways. Portals are not easy to use, but when you get it right... you'll be able to stack more building buffs, trigger dozens of diplomacy events in a row, get extra royal decrees, maybe travel to a negative year (???). Tomes like Rewind will also allow you to regain some cards you've played in the past. Regression will allow you to bend time in a different way. Not to mention the decrees that will take things to the next level as always. The possibilities are endless and, as usual... quite scary for us devs to balance the game. But we think it's gonna be super fun and we can't wait to see what you're gonna do with that big new layer of freedom.

Timing in battle

Troops and enchantment of the King of Time play with the timing during battle. Cards like Adrenaline will make a unit faster the longer it stays in battle. Hourglass is a tower that rewards long battles with massive effects while also giving you wiggle room to mess with it with attack speed buffs. Bastion is a base card that will make enemies travel back to the beginning of the battlefield, giving you the time you need to survive another year. Warper will bend space to summon troops during battle (can you believe we're about to hit 100+ cards and didn't have a proper summoner yet?).

Amplification of effects

One of the most fun things of 9 Kings is finding new synergies between plots. And this deck brings a couple of cards to help you go crazier with those synergies. Amplifier is a building that will replicate every buff it gets to adjacent plots, while Orbiter is a troop that benefits from adjacency like no other. As if we didn't have enough ways to snowball things already.

Perks and decrees

The King of Time introduces, initially, 5 new decrees, 9 unique perks, and 9 broken decrees. Broken decrees are a new mechanic that comes with time traveling. The decrees and perks will introduce a new range of mechanics exploring the boundaries of the new deck design and some other gaps we've noticed in the game. More will follow.

Bane enemy kings

With 9 kings in the game, we believe it is time to give you some agency when picking your enemies. So we're introducing Banisher, a new rainbow perk. When equipped, it will trigger a new screen before the game starts that will allow you to banish a king from the next run. This means they won't appear as enemies nor in diplomacy events. Banisher perk is unlocked when you beat king difficulty.

Balancing & RNG

There are two main types of feedback when it comes to game progression: for some players, the base difficulties are too easy; for others, the harder ones feel too unfair and RNG-reliant. With the addition of new cards and perks, base difficulties were, indeed, easier than intended. On the other hand, the steep curve on higher difficulties also made the game more RNG than we want it to be.

In this patch, we’re implementing meaningful tweaks to address both issues:

1) Game difficulties are now slightly more challenging. We increased the enemy cap and made King of Nothing a bit stronger as an enemy, which should make things more fun to watch and raise the bar a little. Since we know some players just like to chill, Peasant difficulty remains unchanged.

2) The first years of a run are now easier on all difficulties. This means more openers will be viable even on higher difficulties, allowing you to explore new builds. You’ll be able to survive the first few years even with an unlucky hand (or with a card that’s strong later on but weak early in the run). These changes, along with the Banish perk, will hopefully help address your feedback on the RNG side of things. Randomness is part of the fun, but now we wanted to give high-end strategy fans a bit more control as well. Please let us know how the balancing feels. We'll keep improving!

Bonus: some ugly ducks have been buffed and will hopefully make new builds viable (see the list below)

A lot of new achievements (19)

Again, having 9 kings in the game means that a bunch of achievements we always planned are now viable. We have a total of 50 now! The final number of achievements will be decided based on your reception, but we already have plenty of fun new ideas to bring to you when timing is right.

Patch summary:

New content:

• NEW KING: King of Time

• NEW CARDS (10): Bastion, Orbiter, Warper, Portal, Hourglass, Amplifier, Rewind, Regression, Adrenaline, Temp Null

• NEW PERKS (9): Physicist, Destructive, Wise, Manipulative, Agile, Exiler, Invoker, Horologist, Brutal

• NEW RAINBOW PERK (1): Banisher

• NEW DECREES (5): Oddity, Megaminion, Devolve, Flux, Big Bang, Wormhole

• NEW BROKEN DECREES (9): Enrage, Recovery, Provisions, Nullify, Punctuality, Fastforward, Interest, Loot, Redo

• NEW ACHIEVEMENTS (19): Timerelapse, Mega Mega Minions, Nobel Prize, The Enemy of My Enemy is my Enemy, King of Kings, Your Grindness, Agnostic, Wall Street, Suburban King, For Scraps, Meh, Whatever, Babylon, Self-Sufficient, Spoiled, Cold Cold Heart, Flash Mob, Stardew Kingdom, The Spire Slays, Global Warming.

• New battlefield, visuals, and FXs
  

Updates & Fixes:

• You can now see how many free re-rolls you have left.

• Nature's Fertility decree has been buffed (from 3 to 5 Procreate cards).

• Enemy base count and enemy cap have been increased.

• All difficulties (but Peasant) are now more challenging.

• Enemies are weaker in the first years of battle (making more openings viable).

• XP gain increased for all difficulties.

• Trapper base stats have been buffed.

• Bomber base stats have been buffed.

• Static stacks now deals twice as much damage.

• Supplies decree has been rebalanced and the 9 cards you get will now replace your current hand.

• Enemy King of Nothing has been buffed.

• Treant's attacks are stronger, base damage area is smaller.

• Mitigated the "Ghost Raptor" bug (monitoring for a final fix).

• Gamble decree bug where you'd only get two cards in year 34 has been fixed.

• Fixed a bug that caused issues when loading a game in year 33.

• Palace now deals 999 damage instead of Infinite (this is part of the bigger ongoing attack speed design rework).

• Attack speed system cap is now visible. Disclaimer: this was already a system limitation taking place in the backend, as many of you have noticed. Since the battles happen in real time, there are thousands of calculations being made per second in the game, and there’s no sustainable way for attacks to go beyond a computer’s FPS. We have decided to properly structure this and be transparent with players, incorporating it into the game design. When you hit the attack speed cap, all attack speed buffs the plot gets will now be visually converted into damage so you can properly strategize with more clarity. Worth noting, this change also is crucial to make our upcoming game mode work properly and fairly. Please share your thoughts as we improve this together.

• Updated game engine's (Unity) version.
  

Hotfixes (as of 10.8, 3pm EST)

• Traveling to year -1 should now work properly in all scenarios.

• Critical damage buffs are now properly calculated.

• Agnostic achievement is now being triggered properly.

• Boared to Death achievement is now being triggered properly.

• You can now properly make peace and wage war with all kings with Banisher decree equipped.

• Regression + Portal now work properly.

• Illuminism lettering won't linger on screen when you double-concabulate a portal to a blessing year (yes, if you didn't understand a single word of this fix, you're not alone)

• Punctuality broken decree won't give you Bastion cards if you're playing with another king.
  

What's next?

The King of Time is the 9th king. But we're only getting started. With a solid foundation, we'll finally be able to really expand the game beyond it's core. A lot more content will come soon and you can expect a patch with new decrees & cards in the coming weeks. But our main goal right now is introducing you to the new game modes. As we keep balancing out the current kings, we'll finally be able to bring you new experiences to you that are bigger than any deck. Challenge and Ranked modes will hopefully take 9 Kings to a new level.

Stay tuned. For now, we hope you have fun bending time and breaking the game like never before.

Steam Reviews: Your Feedback Matters

We've been reading through all your Steam reviews, and we appreciate the feedback we've been receiving. It's really important to us! 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.

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.

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

Love,
Sad Socket team