The official game launch is upon us - a warm welcome to all new players! To get you up to a good start, here are the most important things you need to know about Dota Underlords:

The basics of all Auto-Battler games, including Dota Underlords, are the following:

1. You build a crew: you buy heroes from a shop which restocks each round to build your army. You put your active army on the board and you can have reserve units on the bench.
2. You search for upgrades and synergies: heroes of the same kind combine into an upgraded version of the hero (there are three upgrades/star levels). Heroes belonging to the same Alliance give your army bonuses.
3. Your army fights against the army of another player (automatically) each round. The winning army inflicts damage to the enemy player.
4. The last player standing out of a free-for-all 8-player lobby wins the game!

To make things a bit more interesting, all Auto-Battler games have hero and item systems that give them strategic depth:

Dota Underlords uses the heroes of Dota with abilities very similar to what they have in Dota 2. That said, even if you haven’t played Dota that’s not much of a disadvantage. The gameplay and strategy of Underlords is completely different from Dota. Learning the heroes and their abilities is quite easy to do in a couple of games.

Underlords User Interface:

Underlords Game Modes:

• Standard: the normal game mode. A match lasts approximately ~30 minutes if you reach a good placement. In this guide, we'll talk about the standard rules and mechanics.
• Duos: the standard mode, but played in a party of two. You and your partner have shared HP and level, and you can share heroes. If you want to learn about this mode, you can check out our Dota Underlords Duos Guide.
• Knockout: a "turbo" version of the game. You gain levels automatically, you find upgrades easier, and you can lose only 4 rounds before you get knocked-out. If you are interested in Knockout (a great first step into the game as it's quicker and simpler), you can go and check out our Dota Underlords Knockout Guide.

You buy heroes from a shop for a specific cost (stronger and rarer heroes cost more gold). To build a great army, you need good gold management. This means that to place high or win a game, you need a good sense of the macro strategy in Underlords, not just the hero combinations.

You can use your gold for three things:

1. To buy heroes, which costs between 1 and 5 gold depending on the rarity of the hero.
2. To re-roll the shop (refresh the heroes inside instantly), which costs 2 gold. This helps you find the exact heroes you need for your upgrades and synergies.
3. To purchase experience. This helps you increase your level faster (you win a little XP every round for free).

Experience: Experience helps you increase your level, which allows you to include more heroes in your army. For example, in the UI screenshot above, 9/9 signifies that there are 9 heroes on the board. This is the maximum possible number for the current level of the player (level 9). Level 10 is the maximum level.

Your level also gives you a higher chance to find rarer heroes in the shop. For example, on lvl1 you can find only common (1-cost) heroes. You can find 5-cost heroes only once you reach lvl8, and the chance increases with higher levels.

Gold: You get gold from a couple of sources. First, you get a set amount of gold each round. Moreover, you get 1g if you win the round against your opponent, 0 if you lose it.

There are, however, other more strategically interesting income sources:

If you save some of your gold, you’ll get 10% interest at the end of the round. For example, if you have 10 gold in the bank, you’ll get 1g as bonus interest at the beginning of the round. If you have 30 gold, you’ll get 3g as interest (the maximum amount).

If you want to maximize your interest income, you need to reach 30g in the bank as fast as possible and hold onto it for as long as possible.

You are not currently spending this amount to make your army stronger, but you have a higher income, which means in the late game you will have higher total gold to spend on your army. In general, the people who have the most total gold to spend on their army are the ones who place highest in the match.

Consecutive wins or consecutive losses give you bonus gold.

This is strategically important: loss streak gold gives you a chance to secure a good economy and win the game eventually even if your initial army is weak. The worst strategy (economically) is to alternate between wins or losses. Try to win every round if you’re strong, or accept that you are weak for a few rounds and play the economy game on the back of interest gold and your loss streak gold. Bear in mind that loss streaks give one free shop reroll each round, which makes it a bit easier to catch-up to the stronger (or luckier) players.

That said, your health is an important resource. It’s not possible to keep a losing streak for very long, you need to get a strong army eventually. As a rule of thumb, it’s ok to loss-streak until you reach 50 health. At that point, you should start thinking about focusing more on your army and winning rounds, but you can still allow yourself to keep a healthy bank. Once you reach 20-30 health, however, you are in dangerous territory and you need to get a strong army ASAP. You might want to spend all of your gold on more levels and upgrades. 

The Board is where you keep your active army. How many heroes you can keep there depends on your level. Of course, more heroes means a stronger army not only because of a numbers advantage but because of the possibility for more/stronger synergies.

The Bench is where you keep your reserve heroes (units that you are keeping for upgrades or possibly to switch strategies). Bench space is a valuable resource, so you need to manage it. You usually want to fill it up, because having more units in total gives you more possibilities to find new combinations and upgrades. Later in the game, however, you will need to make a decision which units you need more and will have to sell-off others to free up bench space. Moreover, keeping a lot of expensive heroes on the bench means you're not taking advantage of the gold invested in them - they aren't making your army stronger and at the same time they don't bring interest gold income.

The shop is where you get your heroes from.

It has a stock of 5 heroes, and the higher your level, the higher the chance some of those will be rare and more expensive.

You can buy any of the five (if you have free space on the board or bench and enough money). You can also re-roll the shop, which will restock it with 5 new options at the cost of 2 gold. This is the main way to find the exact heroes you need, but it is also costly and if you over-do it in the early and mid game your economy will suffer.

So, the basics out of the way, there are three main strategic aspects to building a powerful army:

From the shop, you can buy only one-star units. However, buying the same hero multiple times allows you to upgrade it.

E.g. Three Dragon Knights combine into a two-star Dragon Knight. Three two-star Dragon Knights combine into a three-star Dragon Knight. The highest upgrade is three stars.

Upgrading a hero increases its stats (health, damage, ability damage, and CD, etc.). Usually, with each star level, the basic stats of the unit get doubled. If a hero has 750HP on one star, he’ll have 1500 on two stars and 3000 on three stars (relatively common values).

Upgrading your units is vital because it allows you to use your limited board space more efficiently and increases the overall strength of your army.

Upgrading, however, is difficult:

First, you have to find 9 copies of the same hero to reach three stars. This is costly in terms of gold (from 9g for a 1g cost hero, up to a whopping 45g for a 5g cost hero). Finding the hero 9 times, however, also usually requires a lot of shop rerolls, which is an even bigger gold sink. Last but not least, there is a hidden cost to searching for upgrades: if you are going for a three-star upgrade, you are likely to hold additional copies of the hero on the bench. Gold on the bench is gold that’s neither making your army stronger nor bringing interest income.

Second, going for upgrades requires bench space. You simply don’t have enough space on the bench and board to try to upgrade all your units to three stars at the same time. Usually, you need to make a decision and prioritize upgrading some units over others. Your first priority is to get all of your units to two stars since it’s much easier to do. Then, you want to choose which key units you want to try to get to three stars. Those are units which you intend to use in your final army composition (doesn’t make sense to try to three-star a hero you’re later going to sell). 

Generally speaking, you want to have an army which has a tanky frontline and a damage-dealing backline. You need to think of this not only in terms of units but also synergies. E.g. it’s a good idea to have 3 or 6 Warriors as your frontline because of the armor bonus of their Alliance. Warriors naturally combine well with a damage-dealing backline of e.g. Hunters or Mages.

Example Lineup:

All kinds of lineups are possible, but as in every competitive game, there is a meta. You can check out our article talking about some of the strongest strats in Underlords right now, this Hunters lineup being one of them: Dota Underlords Strongest Builds

Seasons:

To keep the game fresh, heroes in Dota Underlords rotate in and out of the game with every new season - this results in a new meta with every change of the season.

The very basics:

• You want to have your tanky units at the front, your squishy damage dealers at the back.
• You also want to have units whose spell you want to trigger ASAP (e.g. important crow control) at the front so that they get mana from tanking damage.
• You want to have units that benefit from proximity auras right next to each other.
• You want to spread-out your army in the late game if you want to avoid strong AoE spells.

There are, however, many more details that you can take into consideration depending on your lineup and the lineups of your opponents. For example:

So, how does a match of Dota Underlords progress normally and what do you need to do to maximize your chances of winning?

What’s your opening strategy? You want to pick up the strongest unit combination and ideally upgrades in order to start the game on a win-streak.

• If you manage to do so, you might want to level up faster and even reroll to stay ahead of your opponents and keep your win-streak going.
• If your army isn’t strong enough, you might want to concentrate on economy for a few rounds (save up gold) and get a losing streak going.

By the end of the early game, you should have a basic idea of what strategy you’re going for (what Alliance combinations you’re trying to build). You’re still open to changes, but you also know what units to look for and to buy if they pop up.

This is a crucial stage because it’s the last few levels in which you can make major changes to your strategy.

By lvl7-8 you want to have a mature and strong lineup and to start winning rounds. Losing rounds at that point becomes more and more costly in terms of HP.

Economy is also crucial at that point. Ideally, you want to reach 30 gold and keep it in the bank for as long as possible, only spending gold above 30 to keep the 3g interest income. If you are not strong enough and you are losing rounds, however, you might want to spend more to find crucial upgrades or missing pieces for your synergy. You can e.g. maintain a 10 or 20g balance instead of 30 for a few rounds – it’s not optimal, but at the end of the day you need to survive.

If you reach these levels you are likely among the last few players left in the game – you are fighting for a top place in the match. If you are ahead, keep a strong economy going for as long as possible – this will give you the best chances for first place because you need a lot of gold to buy enough XP to reach lvl10 and to find three-star upgrades.

If you are struggling on low HP, however, now is the time to burn your whole bank to try to strengthen your army one last time and to out-last other struggling players.

In our humble, likely biased opinion, Underlords is a brilliant game. To give credit where it’s due, Valve are not the only people responsible for that. Most gameplay decisions and innovations came from the original creators of the Dota Auto Chess custom game, Drodo studio. That said, Valve are taking the game to a new level of polish and refinement.

If you are into strategy games, Dota Underlords is likely the best title you can play on your phone right now, and unlike all other mobile games we’ve ever played besides Hearthstone, it’s a good enough game to dedicate your time to it even on PC.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the article, stay tuned for more Underlords content (you can give us a follow on our social media below!).