Post-Launch Reflections and Plans for the Future
Well, King of the Castle has been out for a week - and what a jam-packed, helter-skelter week it’s been! Almost as eventful as the first week of a Monarch’s reign…
First of all, and most importantly, we want to extend a massive THANK YOU to everyone who’s bought the game and made this launch a success. Genuinely, the last week has been extraordinary and uplifting for this small passionate team who have been working on KOTC for so long, hoping it’d find its audience. And it has! We can’t express our gratitude deeply enough.
Now with your help, we can grow this community even further and kick off a new Golden Age for King of the Castle!
If you’ve already bought the game and want to do us another huge favour, we’d like to ask you to leave a review. Reviews are super important to the Steam algorithm, so even if your review is short and sweet, it’s going to be vital to extending the game’s longevity.
Oh, and if you’re looking for a place to find groups of players who can join your KOTC games, look no further than our Discord. We have multiple party rooms that are a hive of treachery and intrigue… Just as we like it!
Now, with the sappy stuff out of the way, let’s take a look back at how launch day went… And then we can discuss our plans for the future of the game.
Launch Stats
We’ve been blown away by the response here! We should note some extras:
- We were in Steam ‘New & Trending’ for 6 days.
- Our Discord has grown by a thousand members.
- We had a wonderful review in NME which you should read!
What now?
First of all, we want to ask for your patience. King of the Castle is being developed by a small team with a limited capacity and tiny budget. When it comes to adding new stuff to the game, we need to be really careful about what we prioritize.
This is complicated by the fact that this is a very experimental game - there’s nothing else quite like it, which means there’s no pre-established formula. We need to be careful what we add, and make sure to do plenty of pre-update playtesting in case something fundamentally upsets the existing balance of the game.
So far, we’ve had a bounty of excellent feedback and suggestions, but if we wanted to implement even half of them it’d take us years. So we need to pick and choose carefully, but rest assured, your voice is still being heard - every bit of feedback we receive gets added to a big internal sheet, and we carefully track the most-requested features or adjustments.
There’s only two things we can regretfully be sure we won’t prioritize right now, despite much demand.
The first is translations - the game has over 900,000 words, and each event features complex coding and variable tracking which would need to be changed to account for the different grammar of other languages.
Much as we’d love to translate the game, it’d be a monumental task, and extremely expensive - King of the Castle just hasn’t reached that level of success yet. As soon as that changes, we’ll let you know and nobody will be happier than us.
The second thing we can’t offer is a single player mode, or the ability to add bot Nobles to the game - again, this would be a massive task, as King of the Castle was conceived as a purely multiplayer game from the very beginning and none of our code has been written to support a future addition like this.
Our Tech team would have to work on nothing but this for many months, to the exclusion of all other features. We’ll never say never, but we must regretfully say ‘not in the near future’.
There are a bunch of features we can add, especially after hearing your loud and consistent feedback! More on that later.
First off, our number one priority coming out of an intense launch week, is to release a hotfix which addresses the most serious bugs in the game.
V1.01 Hotfix
Here’s a brief overview of the bugs we’re fixing in the next update:
- We’ve had issues with Tutorials jumping around - apologies in particular to Friends at the Table who saw this in their stream. That’s fixed!
- A few events, such as Contested Wreck, had double characters or had the same region twice. Thanks to Peps and Prunelle on the Discord for this one.
- In extremely rare cases, no Events would spawn. This was because of a clash in requirements in Stories, centered around the Spouse Divorce event. Yes, you could be divorced so hard it broke the game.
- We’ve fixed a crash if your spouse has an affair with a Chief named Helga. That’s one to rival the Dwarf Fortress patch notes.
- Nobles not clearing from the Join screen when going back from it.
- Choices were clickable before they became visible.
- Clouds were flying behind Region banners. Not any more - now the clouds stay in the sky where they belong.
- Numerous other small fixes to dozens of events, as well as smattering of spelling and grammar mistakes!
This is just the topline however, and the team are feverishly working on more. Expect this hotfix out early next week.
Our focus for the future
Once this patch is out, what will we do?
Well, probably more bugfixes. Bugs are the worst kinds of enemies - they endlessly respawn and you don’t even get XP for grinding them. But what else?
We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear (Sam’s feedback sheet is running into hundreds of lines!) and are working on a new update which aims to respond to the feedback we've been getting.
Please note this is not a comprehensive list of things we want to update in King of the Castle! If you don't see your 'must have' feature on here, it doesn't mean we don't want to do it.
The first issue we hope to address is…
Monarchs feeling powerless
Our highest priority feedback to address is that our Monarchs are feeling underpowered!
While we need to make sure Regions have a chance at winning and players do find losing fun in KOTC, we also want to give the Monarch a fighting chance!
From 0.10 to 1.0 we saw a 10% drop in Monarch victories in our analytics. This is bigger than it sounds. While it’s partly due to an influx of new players who are unfamiliar with how the game works, there’s definitely some other balance issues here. We’re going to make some changes to give our Monarchs a helping hand.
(But while we think rebalancing is necessary, we want to emphasize that it is currently possible for a sufficiently skilled Monarch to reliably win the game, even with bad RNG! Check out Spofie’s stream if you don’t believe it or have a look at our Discord, where victorious Monarchs are touting their skills)
Here’s what we’re looking into:
- Laws of the Land - these are one of the most important things in the Monarch’s toolbox, so by buffing them slightly, we can make a big difference. We’re going to change them to be available slightly earlier in the game, and we’re also going to look at changing one specific Law…
- The Monarch’s Choice, which currently is purely cosmetic. Changing it to have a gameplay impact may radically alter the balance of the game too far in the Monarch’s favour, so we need to be careful. We’ll tell you more about our plans once we’ve done some playtesting
- Players are feeling like their Ambitions are taking too long to show in the endgame. We’re taking a look at tweaking this, which will also help with feedback we’ve had about the game running long
- Rebellions! They hit hard, which is the design intention, but right now they’re happening a little too frequently. We’re attacking this from multiple angles and will report back after our initial testing is done
- Giving Monarchs improved tools to reward or punish Nobles, to help them get the Votes and win the Nobles to their side
- Making sure Region's Schemes are well balanced and a wider variety are chosen by Regions.
We need to be really, really, really careful about balance with this one. Previous versions of King of the Castle were too difficult for the Nobles and were simply not fun. The current balance is likely a result of over-correcting and now we have analytics from thousands of games we can more accurately balance KOTC.
The last thing we want is to go back to the Nobles being powerless - hence our caution. This is going to take time, a number of careful changes and most of all, a lot of testing internally.
Balance for small games
Next, we’ve received repeated feedback that games of 5 and 6 feel unbalanced, due to the voting disparity. At games of 8 or more, this is felt less keenly, as it’s more difficult for bigger regions to coordinate.
We’re looking at ways of leveling the playing field for all players in those games, while still preserving the style of play that many players like. In general, we’re aware that players have issues with small games and we’re going to do something to fix it!
Save Sharing
We’re learning a lot about how players play King of the Castle. It’s one thing to design, test and playtest, it’s another to have thousands of players jump in.
Something we’re picked up on is that Nobles want to take over as the Monarch after winning the game. We’ve heard your feedback about replacing Claimants with a Noble, but this isn’t something we can do without a major rewrite of the game - especially as in 4 to 6 player games the Claimant appears in Scheme stories.
However, we have some plans for supporting this way of playing King of the Castle. Here’s what we’re looking at changing:
- Making it easier to share save files so Nobles from a winning Region can take over as Monarch in the following dynasty game
- Making Claimants more interesting for players
- A number of balance changes to Dynasty games to ensure one Region doesn’t permanently rule the roost.
Repeated Content
Next on our list is repeated content in the game. This can be split into two bits of feedback: First, that the unchanging early-game events such as the Honour Guard selection are proving repetitive, and second, that some of the other emergent events are showing up too often in the game.
First things first - the early game. We had expected that ongoing Dynasties would be a big part of players’ campaigns. In the later reigns of a Dynasty, early events are shortened for ease of reading. It turns out that we misjudged this - many players prefer to start a whole new game.
There’s multiple angles to attack this problem. We want to make Dynasty games more appealing - currently, people have been complaining of a lack of balance. We also have plans to make the early game events much more varied.
Next - repeated events in the core game. Events are generated semi-randomly, with RNG influenced by the Kingdom stats and various other factors. We keep a very close eye on event generation in our analytics, and we’re going to do some rebalancing based off that.
We’re also going to add new Events to the game, as well as take a look at how Schemes are currently being generated. We’d like to do new Schemes too, but these require some serious testing and balancing, so no promises.
But we also have to ask for some understanding here - in a game with pure RNG, it’s just a law of probability that you’ll see some events multiple times. We have 950+ events in the game and over 900,000 words of content, but even if we doubled this tomorrow, you’d still be getting the same events occasionally. Each storyline can go in dramatically different directions, so embrace the chaos and seek out lesser-seen consequences!
Changes to address the above points will be all be rolled into our 1.1. It's early days but we'll let you know soon as we can when it's coming out.
A final thank you!
And that’s it - these are going to be our focus for the immediate future. If you have your own feedback let us know directly by joining our Discord and posting your feedback in the #kotc-suggestions-feedback channel.
Oh, and one more thing - please remember to leave a review. The Steam algorithm is like a forgetful god, terrifying in its indifference. But with your help, we can force it to sit up and pay attention.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1839880/King_Of_The_Castle
Happy reigns!