9 Kingsfollows the mold ofroguelite games like Risk of Rain, where the game gets exponentially more difficult the longer you stay alive. This means you’re going to need to have a mixture of focusing on the next year, and also planning for years well into the future.

Because it’s a roguelite, you can expect to die, and die often. But, every life is going to teach you a thing or two, as well as level up your King. Over time, all of these lessons (and levels) are going to make a difference, and you’ll build a Kingdom that can stand the test of time.

Be Willing To Adapt Your Strategy

In the early going, you’ll want tobe flexible with your plans, because you have no guarantee that you’re going to get the cards that you’re looking for to accomplish what you’re looking to do. You get a selection of cards available every year, and while you’re able to re-roll them, it costs gold to do so.

Therewill be a shopavailable every few years, andthat’s where you may laser-focus your plansa little bit more; but if you’ve spent your gold re-rolling, you’ll have fewer options when the shop comes around.

9 Kings does not have a system where the more money you have saved up, the more money you earn, like many other Roguelites do. So, the only thing you’ll ever need to worry about is having enough money to buy exactly what you plan on buying.

Mix Towers And Units

While it can be tempting to hyper-focus on one or the other, you’re usually going to want tohave a mix of towers and units if you want to find success. While there are specific builds that can yield results by exclusively using one or the other, it’s going to be much harder to pull off.

Builds that are hyper-focusedlike that are going to have fewer options when it comes to selecting useful cards, andare going to find that certain enemy compositions are going to break their build. For instance, your build might be perfectly effective against the King of Nothing and the King of Nature, but be obliterated by the King of Stone.

Start Buffing Your Kingdom Early

Certain towers provide a small percentage buff to other units or towers, reapplying them every year; usually they buff the ones adjacent to them, but occasionally they’ll do it in a broader case.You’re going to want to have a couple of these out early, buffing things, or you’re going to find that you start getting outpaced in the mid-game.

Get one or two units and towers set up with a buff that starts rolling early, and those numbers are going to get exponentially bigger as you survive. Toward the late game, it’smuch more valuable to have a medium amount of strong units or towersthan it is to have a lot of huge amount of weak ones.

Study The Other Kings

Certain opponents are going to pose unsolvable problemsfor your build, even if you aren’t hyper-focusing on one mechanic. Oftentimes, in the late-game, enemies start moving outrageously fast. 9 King’s hit-per-second statistic on your units and towers is not entirely truthful, meaning that you can have a tower that says it hits 50,000 times-a-second, but does not.

Occasionally, you’re going to get the chance to either make peace with an enemy, or declare war on a new one.Make sure you know which ones are causing problems, and which ones you can easily handle.

You will have a rebellion that is not led normally by a King, and you cannot make peace with them. They use similar units to your Kingdom, and are basically named “(Your King) Rebellion”. If they’re causing you the most problems, the only solution is to tweak your Kingdom to deal with them, specifically.

Reset Your Perks Often

Each King that you use in 9 Kings levels separately, andeach of them receives one perk point every time they level up. These perks provide a passive benefit to them, and can make a meaningful difference in your run.

Each King has a few unique perks, so if there are certain perks that you’re really interested in, you’ll need to play with those Kings specifically to unlock them.

These can be reset for free, sodon’t be afraid to reset your perks and try new things regularly. You’ll find some new build ideas that you enjoy playing, and might stumble across something particularly potent.

Learn The Card Types

This is not a hard-and-fast rule, but in general,re-rolling your card selection is going to give you cards that are the same colorto choose from. That means if you have red cards as your options, you’re going to have more red options when you re-roll.

This rewards learning the different cards in each card type; if you’re looking for a Beacon, for instance, re-rolling red cards isn’t going to yield you any results, because Beacons aren’t red.

You generally get the card color of the King that you just fought, to start the next year. This means making peace with the King of Nature, for example, will make it much more difficult for you to obtain green cards.

Plan Your Board From The Beginning

As mentioned before, most units and towers that have effects that influence others do so to those adjacent to them. This means that you’re going to want toplan out your board from the very start, even if you aren’t exactly sure what you want to use, yet.

For example, you don’t usually want to place two different units or towers directly next to each other; this means there’s one less space where they can have a different card in between them that buffs them both, like a Blacksmith.

To make this a little easier, here are the majority of Tower and Unit types in the game (with a few exceptions).

A Tower thatattacks enemies from its locationin the Kingdom.

Attacking Unit

A Unit that attacks enemies after entering the battlefieldoutside the Kingdom.

Buffing Tower

A Tower thatbuffs other Units and/or Towers, depending on the effect. Usually these only buff locations adjacent to them, but certain ones, like the Quarry, buff every Attacking Tower in your Kingdom.

Castle

This isn’t always necessarily a Castle, but it is atile unique to the King that you chose, and you’ll have to put it down first. Thisacts as an Attacking Tower in most ways, but you can only have one of them in your Kingdom.

Use Auto Attack

Auto-Attack is usually going to increase the damage of your King’s Castle(or equivalent), because it does not miss. There are some exceptions to this; certain attacks have an area-of-effect (AoE) factor to consider, and the Auto option does not take into account hitting more than one enemy, meaning it might target a single enemy instead of a group.

But, it does generally attack whichever enemy is closest to the castle, and are usually the biggest current threat.

You will, however,almost certainly need to use the Auto-Attack option if you’re using Beacons near the building. Beacons increase attack speed, and so toward the mid-game, your Castle is going to start attacking hundreds of times a second, if not more. No one can possibly interpret information that fast, making the Auto-Attack option the way to go.