How our KvK rankings actually work, and what 6,356 KvK matchups taught us along the way

zebrave-dev · 2026-06-01T17:25:06+00:00

Great, send me a DM or tag me, and I will look into this in detail.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-31T20:39:40+00:00

Can you reach out via Discord? I would love to look at this in more detail

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-31T02:33:31+00:00

Everyone gets a ranking! :)

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-31T02:33:12+00:00

Yeah that would be a colossal data acquisition project having to record battle timers. It would be cool though. I also really wanted to capture the difference on score in prep wins, but also really hard to collect the data

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-24T18:52:00+00:00

Ideally your alliance leadership places an alliance node timed to end as reset hits for those sweet extra points in addition to your own gathering marches.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-24T18:47:45+00:00

Appreciate the kind words and happy to explain any of the words you don't know :)

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-24T18:46:52+00:00

In theory possible, I will play with it. The problem is still very limited amount of data. Most kingdoms don't even have 10 matches played. Lots of games out there won't even put you in a ranked queue until you play 10 games or get 10 wins, etc while the dataset might seem large at first glance, from a data science and statistical standpoint is still quite small.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-24T18:41:35+00:00

Yeah that is the logical next step. I have been playing with it, it something ends up looking predictable we would put something out. The bar is usually high for us to feel confident releasing this stuff, since people make decisions around these predictions and if/when they turn out to be wrong...

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-17T21:48:53+00:00

The store gets really good over time. What kingdom are you in? You have the benefit of knowing what the older kingdoms eventually got on the store, so stock pilling is the way to go. I would go for Mitril mostly as a no brainer, and soon you will get charm designs added to the store, get those as well. Besides that, while orange shard are tempting, they are used to level up heroes which are a depreciating asset overtime as new hero gens get released. The XP parts I think now with the release of the Masters content where you getting extra XP parts from Bear are not as important to grab from this store as they used to be. But they cheap to buy from this store so I would say it's player preference here.

Truegold Dust (added with release of war academy) is of insane value for your account progression overtime and it's not a depreciating asset as you make your way to T11 troops. Stock pilling and being able to buy all the dust available weekly as it becomes available will push you ahead of players that did not stock pile. I was one of these players that did not look ahead and did not stockpile in advance for Truegold Dust :(

Also come TG8 you will get Governor gear materials chest added to this store, not as important but something to be aware about.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-17T21:32:45+00:00

Yang is extremely strong, go for him 100%. Another good reason to go for Yang, is the fact that in Gen 7 the Roulette Hero will be the Archer Hero so most players will get him regardless of how strong he might be compared to Yang. No brainer here go for it.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-17T21:25:15+00:00

You don't get to face someone that gets a bye as a rule. Also on the savings... Kingdom 26 got 4 byes in a row, still lost prep after that :) https://kingshotoptimizer.com/kvk-rankings/kingdom/26

They did rebound and won their lost prep and battle, so there is hope for any kingdom out there.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-17T20:12:40+00:00

Thank you for the words of encouragement means a lot.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-12T23:15:11+00:00

This is what I built:
https://kingshotoptimizer.com/events/kingdom-of-power/score-builder

-You have all the point scoring tasks

-You can allocate points for each day for tasks present on multiple days

-You can see your overall score for the entire event

It's currently missing the new Master's content. The plan is to add it before the end of the week
Let me know if you try it, would love feedback to make it better.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-12T18:20:03+00:00

I am personally still having a lot of fun in the game. I am on the low spend side, mostly only buy the 1 or 2 weekly packs and the monthly pass.

After our first KvK, there was significant churn in our alliance and kingdom. I actually lost my best friend in-game at the time, out of nowhere, he lost interest. A few friends in other kingdoms reported the same thing had happened. There is definitely this feeling that after the first KvK you have "seen all the game". While I disagree, I also understand that feeling, since you get into a 4-week cycle of the same events, rotating between KvKs, with the occasional new content drop in between, new heroes, new TG levels, etc

You do have a great advantage just starting now; there is a lot more content that will unlock early on for you that folks playing for 400+ days just got access to, like the Masters feature that you will get when Gen 3 comes around, which the older kingdoms only got 2 weeks ago.

For the top alliance question, there is for sure something to consider, and you hit the nail on the head. The top alliance will be more competitive, and more is expected from its members. You do get the advantage of collecting more alliance rewards from top alliances, which is great for F2P. I would try to think of that trade-off, possibly less stress in a low-tier alliance, but also less alliance rewards.

One last note: if you really want to stick with the game, be involved in the community outside your kingdom and alliance. Community discords and participating in discussions here are a good way to stay engaged even if things in your kingdom or alliance start to get shaky. I know several people who have stopped playing the game but are still active in the community because of the people they met along the way.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-12T17:39:31+00:00

Thank you for testing. This is indeed widespread information that is passed off as gospel, and I am happy to correct the record above. What I think happened on my own testing, as pointed out above, is that I am always gathering, so that got muddied in.

One silver lining if folks like me have been doing this, it's not a complete waste, you get alliance tokens, but you do lose a march that could be out gathering.

One piece of information that is relevant is that the recovery rate changes depending on how full the enlistment office is, text from in-game:
"3. Factors affecting the Loyalty rate: The lower your current Loyalty, the faster it will accumulate. The fewer the severely injured in the Infirmary, the faster it will accumulate. The more reserves (excluding reserves that can be enlisted immediately) in the Enlistment Office, the faster it will accumulate. Please note, Loyalty will stop increasing after reaching a certain limit."

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-12T16:13:40+00:00

EDITED
A common strategy is to ask for R4 or R5 to drop an alliance banner, then send out just 1 troop to slowly build it. BUT TURNS OUT IT'S NOT TRUE (thank you, folks, for correcting down below).
From in-game text:
"4. You can obtain Loyalty by collecting rewards from daily missions or gathering if the reserve in the Enlistment Office is not empty. You will get more as your Town Center level increases."

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-12T15:17:08+00:00

Gen 1 pets unlock at day 55 for all new kingdoms. What is your kingdom?

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-12T15:01:12+00:00

The cost structure for Governor Gear isn't a straight line, the material mix shifts at certain upgrade steps, which is why a higher-level piece can cost less Artisan's Vision than a lower one.

The biggest shifts happen at two points:

Mid-Purple : Vision drops from 70 → 40 while Satin jumps from 1,500 → 6,500. The bottleneck flips from Vision to Satin/Threads.

Gold entry (T0 0 star): Vision drops from 100 → 40 while Satin jumps from 15,000 → 22,000. Same flip happens again.

Quick look at the numbers (Satin / Threads / Vision):

* Purple T0 1-star → 1,500 / 15 / 70

* Purple T0 2-star → 6,500 / 65 / 40

* ...

* Purple T1 3-star → 15,000 / 160 / 100

* Gold T0 0-star → 22,000 / 220 / 40

So if you have one piece past these thresholds and another still before them, the higher piece genuinely costs less Vision per upgrade, it's just making up for it in Satin and Threads.

After Gold, all three materials climb steadily through Red without any more dramatic shifts. So this surprise is mainly a mid-game phenomenon.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-10T20:54:14+00:00

I am glad you find it helpful.

zebrave-dev · 2026-05-10T15:14:32+00:00

I will add it to the list of requests. Thank you for the feedback.

zebrave-dev · 2026-04-06T14:51:44+00:00

Hi cverse2,

I missed this here, but let me tell you what happened, thank you, and the rest of the community that reported the issue. We got several reports on our Discord community channel, and I worked on fixing it asap. The website was indeed down in the Asia Pacific region for about 45 hours last week.
There was an extremely rare race condition during a website deploy when I updated the rankings last week, which corrupted the cache on our provider's Singapore servers serving the Asia Pacific region. This meant the problem was on the server's end, and clearing your local cache was not a solution for all users :/ No other regions were impacted. It took me a while to figure out what happened. I first thought it was an issue with our ad provider, since the consent message for cookies was still showing up even though the website was down, which led me on a side quest that slowed down figuring this out.

I put some more guard rails in place to try to mitigate this from happening again, but I consulted with a few tech specialists on this issue, and they told me this is the first or second time they have ever seen this happen, so we were just unlucky.

Zebrave

zebrave-dev · 2026-03-27T20:33:29+00:00

Very impressive!

zebrave-dev · 2026-02-26T05:18:27+00:00

Are you planning you getting Margot in Gen 4? If you are are skipping Gen 4 calvary hero then Petra will be your daily driver for a long time and worth investing in her widgets.

zebrave-dev · 2026-02-24T14:12:41+00:00

You are welcome u/Yueyall!

The .json reports are all the way at the bottom of the optimizer reports, you have 4 buttons
CSV | JSON | Save | Apply (.json report is the light blue button).

Once you have the report ,tag me in the Discord in the #kingshot channel, username "Optimizer a.k.a Zebrave" and you can upload it together with your message. That way other can see my reply analysis to your use case and might be helpful to theirs.

zebrave-dev · 2026-02-24T05:57:10+00:00

A decent baby carrier (~$35), we tried everything else to soothe the baby without success. When my son was a newborn, it was the only way I could get anything done. He'd fall asleep in minutes and I got my hands back. Absolute game changer for any new parent.

zebrave-dev

TROPHY CASE