9 Kings News

It's been a wild ride. And thanks to you, 9 Kings has become bigger than we could've ever imagined. We couldn't be happier about where we're headed, but as we grow, we've been needing more and more help.

So today, we're bringing in the cavalry.

[h2]Hooded Horse is now the global publisher of 9 Kings! [/h2]
If you know Hooded Horse, then you probably know why we're stoked. If you don't, let's just say they're one of the coolest indie publishers in the world with some of the titles we admire most in the industry. We're thrilled to now be a part of their roster. With their help, alongside INSTINCT3 in Germany, we're sure we're gonna make the best version of 9 Kings possible.

[h2]What does that mean for you?[/h2]
This means 9 Kings will now have two of the things we need most: TIME and REACH. Some of you might be curious, so let's break it down. With their resources, we'll be able to:

Localize the game into more languages
Have a more thorough QA pipeline
Reach a wider audience
Bring the game to more platforms (TBA)
Have more time to actually develop the game!!!
Give our community the attention it deserves (on Discord, Reddit, and Twitter)
And much more we can't share just yet
[h2]Join our new Discord and Subreddit![/h2]
As Hooded Horse's first royal decree, 9 Kings now has its own Discord server and Subreddit! You can finally engage with the community anywhere you like. They will be handling moderation, but we'll jump in every now and then to say hi (and obviously read all the feedback).

[h2]Official EA release date: May 19th[/h2]
We know, the store said April. But so much happened this month, and we want to make sure that we deliver the best EA launch possible. We hope you understand! There's still a long way to go during EA, but we're confident that by May 19th we'll have a very fun 9 Kings experience for you.

Stay tuned: next week we'll be sharing what you can expect from the EA release!

Shout out to everyone involved in making this happen. We can't wait for May 19th.

Love,
Sad Socket team

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2784470/9_Kings/

Surprise super-cool flash patch COMING TOMORROW:

- Improved projectile performance drastically
- Troops now take over a wider battlefield space! (improving visibility and unit behavior)
- Buffed Demon's Altar FOR REAL now.
- Endless progression is yet a biiit milder
- Cemetery now shows the damage caused by its imps.
- Fixed a rare bug where troops would stop attacking unexpectedly (no more coward warriors!)
- Improved Scout Tower stat calculations
- Fixed Thief teleporting performance issue
- Projectiles no longer randomly stay on the ground
- Minor localization fixes

TEMPORARY NOTE: we identified a gamebreaking bug that caused some units to not attack on certain occasions. We are rolling-back to the previous stable patch and will bring this patch back tomorrow. We really hate doing this, but we hope you understand we're sprinting to drastically revamp Endless Mode performance before EA, and sometimes these moves mess with some core (otherwise stable) parts of the game. We're focused on very aggressive measures to improve performance, and with it, there are some risks. Bear in mind that we're taking those risks now so we won't have to during EA. New patch is coming soon. Please hang in there!

Love,
Sad Socket team

This one is a smaller patch with balancing and performance tweaks. We'll keep listening closely to your inputs in the forums!

- Demon's Altar was buffed
- Endless Mode progression is now milder (fibonacci multiplier now has 1/2 its intensity)
- Improved performance to prevent occasional game freezing after card placement.
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to lag heavily in Chinese due to a font issue (对不起!)
- Overall performance improved
- Minor localization/text tweaks

Please share your experience on Endless Mode with us after this update. As we mentioned in the forums, we're looking for a sweet spot here. A run can't last forever, but we want it to last for as long as it is fun.

We'll share the official EA release date with you soon. But we're working hard to make sure the launch is as polished as it deserves to be, no stones left unturned. Hope y'all understand. We can't wait to share more news with you!

Love,
Sad Socket team

Hey, everyone. We’re finally heading toward a demo version with a stable Endless Mode. There’s always room for improvement, but our focus is now shifting toward the Early Access release that’s just around the corner (make sure to wishlist 🙏). We can’t wait!

Anyway, massive performance improvements were necessary for this one. And here’s what’s new:

• Heavily improved memory usage.
• 9 Kings went on a diet and now weighs less than half its original size in MBs!
• Improved Endless scaling: early years are even easier, final years are much harder.
• Increased max enemy count (did I mention the final years are harder?)
• The two points above mean the "canon gamebreaking year" has increased drastically.
• Balancing: leveling up a troop will give you the same amount of extra units as the first card (i.e you will get 9 soldiers per level instead of 9-3-3)
• Fixed the recurring bug that caused the game to soft lock during late game (this was a hard one, and the reason this patch took this long - please keep us posted!)
• Fixed a glitch that caused towers’ attack speed stat to underperform.
• Fixed a bug that caused Mangler to not be properly affected by DMG upgrades.
• Russian is now available.
• The game no longer slows down when you have no units (it's now a menu option!).
• You can now disable blood particles (this is a family friendly kingdom!)
• Improved card descriptions.
• Improved fonts

We really hope the game runs smoother than ever on everyone’s computers. But please share your experience with us! Since this update drastically changes the way data is handled, we’ll be on the lookout for possible hot-fixes immediately.

Love,
Sad Socket team

I very much recommend the Steam demo for strategy game 9 Kings, so it's with no shade I say that I'm using 'strategy' here the same way a tube passenger might use a hardback of Ulysses to envelop their novelisation of 2 Fast 2 Furious. Griddy placement and tower defence tactics are involved, but this is primarily a game about launching rocks at dickheads. This is fine by me: launching rocks at dickheads is as solid a premise as any videogame needs to have.

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