Unfinished: Dota Underlords 06/20/2019

dota 3 when

GB playing board games again and starting with the classic Chess ♟

its a trap!

Cool, just started getting into MOBAs and I'm not sure if I like LoL or Dota2 more yet, but perhaps one of the autochess versions will stick with me.

Magnus Gerstmann

This looks way more approachable

And now Jeff has caught The Dota.

I still have absolutely no fucking idea what this game is about or how you play.

I think some numbers went up and some gold was earned/spent.

So, it's a clicker?

I now understand everyone that doesn't play video games, sees them and tries to figure out why would anyone play them what the appeal is only to conclude they don't need them in their life.

This is an entirely different branch of stuff that I could not possibly relate to because I'd had to be a moba player beforehand to make the connections.

Oh no Ben.

I have no damn idea about what's going on. It looks... messy.

Something that has confused me is why Ben called it "Auto Chess: Origin". Probably because on iOS its called "Auto Chess: Origin" but on PC and Android, its called just "Auto Chess".

It has absolutely no skillset in common with moba play. It's a card game. It's Hearthstone or MTG. The only thing that Dota experience would help with is recognizing units and items. I have 0 of that experience and it's not an issue.

Auto chess isn't a version of a MOBA, there's no overlap in the game play at all.

Eight players acquire units (cards) and place them in their play field. They then fight each other one on one. The units that win do damage to the other player. There are methods to acquire more units, level them up, and make them stronger with loot. The units can also interact with each other synergistically to make each other stronger. It's a card game with round by round drafts, essentially. It's not complicated, but it's a lot of visual information to process if you are new to it.

I've been playing the one from the original people over at Drodo on my phone and I prefer it to this. As a former dota player, I'm sick of Valve for a bunch of reasons but this bad stealing of everything is just grossing me out. Plus, I'd rather reward the original ppl.

@drm2thej: One question: how do you get into mobas without devotimg the time equovalent to a doctorates thesis to it?

Hey Ben.

Maybe just pretend that not everybody knows everything you know about the game. It helps to explain things.

It's like a Donkey Punch but you have a Wilford Brimley moustache on.

"It's good that I'm losing."

"I'm not good at playing from behind."

I wish the matches weren't so long. Thanks for the video guys!

The whole autochess genre continues to amaze me by fooling people who normally would never be interested in card games into playing what is essentially a deck-building card game.

Never would have guessed that Jeff would ever be remotely interested in this genre.

@drm2thej: I'm impartial to DOTA2 but from a non-biased objective standpoint, the main difference in gameplay is LoL relies much more heavily on skillshotting while DOTA relies more on strategy and adaptation (item builds). (I also want to say DOTA has more instances of relying on micromanagement.) And of course there's the locked hero pool in LoL.

@agemyth: Drodo have gone on record saying they wholeheartedly want as much RNG in their game as possible, so you're not making anything up in regards to item drops. That's how they like it.

Auto Chess seems to have embryonic ideas for a good game, but it's ruined by fairly poor game mechanics (in my opinion), way too much RNG, and ludicrous session time for what it is. (average Auto Chess game on mobile takes about 20-25 minutes).

I tried this after playing Auto Chess Origins for a few weeks now and god the interface sux/ It is so much harder to know what class characters are and i couldn't figure out how to bring the buy menu back up. It just seems way less readable than Auto Chess unless you really know the DOTA units which I don't.

Played some of it, overall I can see why people would like this game (comapred to the autochess mod video which just looked in comprehensible.) It's basically drafting + miniatures, but without a rewards structure in place I don't quiet see "it"

worked very well on my phone just felt a lil too small for the phone likely looks fine on tablets.

I watched this video and if someone asked me what Auto Chess was and how you played I'd be blanking

@excitable_misunderstood_genius: after i short, vivid nightmare last night about trying to understand auto-chess, I think I can parse that. A card game that always has your monster cards attack maybe is the thing? I still don't know, but the headless cat said so.

The idea of purposely wanting to lose rounds is not super appealing to me? I also don't really have any idea what to spend my money on in this game... trying to build synergies with the unit types and stuff but it seems like I'm just picking cool bonuses at random.

I been playing and enjoying the league one, kind of surprised that this somehow has worse and less informative UI though considering how ROUGH leagues is

Also the League of Legends one is real-time fights, thats kinda odd to see that there isn't real-time pvp

I loved Artifact until they tried fixing it.

Watching this reminds me how much fun I had with Artifact at launch. The core game was excellent. This doesn't appeal to me at all, but maybe it will hook me when I try it. Totally turned off by the match length, though.

Uhhh what? This game is going right over my head. Both in terms of what exactly is going on and also, how are these games so popular??

I know this is another autochess, but Ben and the team made it seem like everyone must know what an autochess is so let's not explain things in this quick look.

Also, game looks boring? I may not know what's going on and this game certainly isn't trying to draw me in. Dota continues to float past me.

@excitable_misunderstood_genius:

That makes it sound easier to grasp and more appealing to me, as someone who had no knowledge of card games (CCG/TCG) before watching a few Hearthstone videos and trying the PS3 MTG - Duels of the PlanesWalkers games on my Brother's account.

The combination of game mechanics, strategy, synergy and luck of the draw hooked me, and though I've given up on Hearthstone except for the Dungeon Runs, I'm finding MTG Arena quite fair both in match-making and drop rates in the packs you earn, almost other pack I'm getting something which at least looks interesting or might have potential, and the legendary cards are both more common and more useful than my experience with HearthStone. Just as with Roguelikes, if you give them a chance, they give a lot back and they're similarly suitable for short or long sessions, I'd like to hear more from Brad and his journey into cards, last night I almost Slayed the Spire for the first time.

@mrspoon: You might see some familiar faces in the auto chess scene as a lot of the big streamers/youtubers are former Hearthstone people like Amaz (who seems to be playing Riot's TFT version right now) and Savjz (who seems to be playing Valve's Underlords version).

You can't equip your Dota 2 hats :/

To be clear, you don't have to intentionally lose rounds. It's just that you get extra gold for keeping a streak going, so if you find yourself on a losing streak already, as long as you're not taking too much damage it's more valuable to keep gold in your pocket and have more to spend on better units & leveling up instead of spending your gold to fix the short term problem of losing rounds.

It's not that different from choosing between putting creatures on the board in a magic game to have something to block with & stop losing hitpoints VS playing cards that give you more mana or cards for the future while taking some extra damage on the chin in the short term. Just like other cardgames, you gain advantages for building your 'deck' around similar creatures / units. Just like in magic, you use equipment / items to enhance units in certain ways.

Finally, your positioning impacts how your line-up fares against the opponent. If the opponent has assassins that jump the backline, you want to push your glass cannon heroes a bit more in the front so they don't get killed off early. If the opponent has heroes that deal a lot of area of effect damage, you want to spread your heroes out so a bunch of your units won't get hit by it.