About time we had a thread for these games*. For those who are unfamiliar, auto chess started as a mod in dota2 and got so popular it's spawned at least 3 copies of the original so far (not really sure how this is legal since I don't think the original devs got paid much at all but I think it has something to do with them being Chinese so lol IP). Afaict no one is playing the original right now so i'll briefly summarise the other 3. There isn't really that much to choose between them apart from a few small mechanics differences so it mostly comes down to which UI and world you prefer. If you want to pick one i'd recommend trying TFT and DU for a couple of hours each and seeing which clicks best. If you're only interested in mobile and don't like DU then try Drodo's game

Drodo's Auto Chess

By far the weakest of the 3 imo, this is mostly a mobile game atm that I believe is about to start making a proper move to pc. Pieces are clearly just cutesy versions of dota characters in a way so blatant that only the Chinese would try it. Maybe it will be popular in China idk. I did find their mobile version easier to use than underlords' mobile version though it's likely i'm an outlier in that.

Valve's DOTA Underlords

Based on the original DOTA universe. Just released their mobile version so it's pretty much an even split between mobile and pc players atm. If you want to play on both pc and mobile this is probably the game for you and if you're going to play just on pc then it's probably just personal preference between this and TFT. This is the one I've been playing most and having a lot of fun with it.

Riot's Team Fighting Tactics

Based on the League of Legends universe this game just released the other day and is currently the most popular with twitch streamers (126k viewers aorn and streamers are playing casual tournaments with 3k for the winner), though I reckon this is likely to flip back and forth based on how the games progress with updates (if there was ever a time for companies to throw money at streamers this is it though I haven't seen it happen yet) .

Not going to write my own guide but this one translates really easily to all the other games. If you prefer video's here's 2p2's very own Luckayluck's guide to the original game.



To avoid confusion I propose we use these acronyms as headers when talking about a specific game: DAC=original auto chess; AC=Drodo auto chess; DU=DOTA Underlords and TFT=Team Fighting Tactics.

e.g.

*Disclaimer: I've only been playing for a few days and didn't bother doing any research so there's a good chance some/most of this is wrong. Also haven't played either dota or LoL.

Have been largely busy or travelling for the last few weeks, but once I'm back this week from Vegas I will definitely look into TFT. Played a lot of LoL so a good strategy sim from that universe seems amazing and all the reviews are really positive. Just sounds like it needs a bit of Riot polish which I'm sure it will get.

Just realised I wrote Slark instead of Slardar. For anyone new to to the game I do not recommend playing Slark in a warrior hunter build.

DU is now free to play. Autochess is basic tower defense but versus. If you have played games like Squadron Tower Defense mod on SC2, it is like that but instead of clearing waves your heroes fight the other teams heroes. Not really played DAC at all so hoping that DU will stand up to all the hype!

Been playing DU some (on PC only so far, but it's very cool can just transparently continue play on mobile). It's great! Managed one win where I got lucky with druids early on and build a large bankroll from win streaks and interest.

Just for clarification:

As of 6/24/19...

Underlords is in Open Beta and is available on PC and Mobile. It was apparently designed as Mobile-first, but they are slowly transitioning to making the PC version better. The UI is very crowded, but it works. There are balance issues, but the Underlord team has been doing well with taking feedback and translating it into quick updates. After the Artifact fiasco, it is refreshing that they have been open and responsive to communication.

Underlords is a completely separate install from the Dota 2 client and can be found on Steam.

Team Fight Tactics is only playable if you have an Honor 3 account on the PBE. It is scheduled to start being released on the main client as early as tomorrow, 6/25/19, but they are doing it region by region. I don't know the specifics on which regions will get it first, but they have openly stated that they already know that their servers are going to get crushed so they need to roll it out slowly. It will more than likely be released to everyone by the end of the week. There have been a lot of queuing issues so plan accordingly and don't be surprised if your wait times are in the range of hours.

Team Fight Tactics is currently only on PC and will be playable inside of the League of Legends client. If they find the game remains popular, they may release it on its own client like Underlords. They are looking into Mobile, but it doesn't appear to be a priority right now.

I've been wanting to try these out but I have heard that each match can be a bit of a time commitment, not unlike Dota/LoL.

Are any of the 3 versions accessible to people who can only play ~10 minutes at a time?

Not sure about the others, but DU games take longer than that:

~20m if you get crushed
~30m if you do ok
~40m if you're winning

There is however an "offline against bots" mode which plays well and removes the timer, that can just be paused/minimized at will and resumed later (and is great for learning the details).

Valve are well aware of desire for shorter games though and "A turbo mode" is high on their to do list.

With what Dave said above, TFT said their goal is games that range from about 27 to 33 minutes. They want to be on the faster side while keeping the game fair and not so reliant on RNG.

Not sure how a turbo mode would work without tweaking some game mechanics along with turn times. I have trouble doing everything I need to do in a turn already. Would rather they added 5 secs to turn times than removed it tbh. Imo playing 2 or 3 games over ~90 minutes is a reasonable chunk of my day to spend gaming (though of course I usually end up doing double that).

Going through some character/tribe abilities on my commute so I get a better idea how some of the less common ones work. Does anyone know how attack speed works with trolls? It says it adds 35/65 to pieces' AS but AS all seems to be round about 1 in their character profiles, should it say 35/65%? Not clear on how silence works in this game either

Also mathed out enigma's ult, it takes ~40/50/60% of every enemy's remaining health within 2/3/4 cells over 10 secs for anyone curious.

For me after trying a little bit Auto Chess looks and runs a lot better than Underlords on mobile, I think Valve have a lot of work to do in that regard.

I downloaded underlords on my cell today and the screen would recognize down as up so whatever orientation i put my phone, it was upside down.

DU:

Found myself accidentally playing a super strong build I'd never thought about before. Normally I just fall into a tank class (warrior, mech or druid) and a ranged class (mage, hunter or assassin) and try and fill in the support classes as they come up but in this game I kept finding upgrades for my warriors and druids and not for my ranged class (mostly hunters) so I ended up with this super tanky build with a ton of heal due to level 2/3 enchantress that stomped everyone all through the midgame. Popular opinion says that druids are great in the early game but fall off hard in the late game but this 3 warrior 2 druid 3 hunter build was really strong and really flexible. Will definitely try it again. Actually managed to finish second here cos i wasn't smart enough to build a slark as a 4th scaled vs mage.



Also won my first game where I went for a hard loss streak earlier. Got silver linings in the first 3 creep rounds so open forted (played 0 units on board) for the first 14 rounds and somehow still didn't have any pairs despite buying and selling as much as good econ would allow. Took me a couple of extra rounds to stabilise from there and ended up in assassins instead of the mages I was looking for so was down to 28 health before I won a round and then win streaked to the end from there. Lvl 3 kinky demon lady is ridiculous. Think it was an extra weak lobby though with no good mage builds.



Also feel like i'm making massive game losing mistakes constantly but everyone else is bad enough that i'm still leveling up at a decent rate. Will be funny to look back on how bad i am now at this rank in a years time and see how everyone's improved (smuggler 5 atm).

Never played DOTA so I am trying Underlords out with bots. Was able to crush Med strength ones after a few tries. Fun little game. Very glitchy playing in single player mode - just freezes occasionally and when I win it just stalls.

I think I read this was to be fixed in tonight's patch (which I don't believe is out yet)

welp now im addicted thanks you jerks

Lol same. It's a problem. New meta is more interesting than the old one though they boosted knights too much. Went from by far the worst class to by far the best and cos they work well with mages we're still seeing a lot of them. Shamans becoming good has been fun though.

Also nice to be confident they'll rebalance things soon after years of frustration with blizzard's refusal to balance anything outwith new expansions and the occasional massive nuke from orbit type nerf. Speaking of which kotl could probably do with some damage reduction along with the current extra mana requirement.

New patch is out for du and I think the meta will change a fair bit again. Patch notes are here.

New blood bound item is awesome and while i reckon it will still be a bit memey, it's super strong when it works. Like strange bedfellows but stronger and easier to pull off. Four warlocks is probably legit now as well.

This was my first game after the patch and while enigma carried me a bit at the end the blood bound item on troll warlord was awesome. An hour ago warlocks and trolls were purely support classes and blood bound wasn't a thing at all. It's really fun to have a game that changes this much week to week. Also learning a ton every time I play so that my previous posts look really dumb when I reread them a few days later (though writing shamans instead of trolls was an honest mistake in the last post)

My biggest leak continues to be positioning. I had a sneaking suspicion that troll+warlords would be OP now and have gone 2nd, 2nd and 8th forcing them.

Was gonna say I was pretty sure trolls and warlocks are still more of a meme and won't work consistently but then I had this game right after the first one so you might be right. Had the troll and warlock globals so surrounded luna and medusa with trolls to buff their attack speed by >100 and they did a ton of work. Was knights trolls for most of it but switching to 4 warlocks worked well, they healed for >10k in the last game.

Can I just say that Star Trek was way off with the type of chess they would be playing in the future.

I've been playing DU since launch and the game is pretty awesome. At the start, I made it to Leutenant V without every losing a rank, but then people got better and Im now hovering between L I and L IV for a while, still having a lot of fun, though.

That being said, I think that the game needs some serious balance changes, it seems like tier 4 and 5 units are way too strong - almost every game now involves rushing high level and replacing all your units with 1* and 2* tier 4 and 5s.

At least when there was a mage meta, you could kill them with aggressively leveling your low tier units before they got strong, now even 1* Kunkka or Dusa can stop a strong composition. I think that they either need to make those top tiers rarer (thus making low tier 3* easier to obtain), 3* low tier units stronger or lower tier alliances like warriors stronger.

In general, I would really like to see alliances get buffed in general, right now the game seems to more about picking the strongest units rather than good/interesting compositions, which makes it shallower imo

oh, and one more thing: make creeps stronger! right now, it's almost impossible to lose to them, and even if you do, you dont lose health and still get an item, which makes those rounds feel like a waste of time. In DAC, you actually sometimes needed to spend some gold before tougher creep rounds to preserve health and have a change to get an item, here it's just whatever

Yeah i agree with you about the balance changes. Think i've only seen one winning comp that wasn't just good stuff in the last few days and that was a ridiculously high rolly 6 scrappies build with 3 inventor globals and with all the 1 and 2 costs 3 starred, and even then it was close. Personally i like having time to think in the creep rounds. There's so much to think about in this game and so little time to do it that getting a minutes breather to reassess or to level/roll every 5 rounds really helps.

I've been checking to see what other comps ppl have and if there aren't too many anti-mages I'll try to go demons. Otherwise yeah, it does appear that good stuff wins right now. I think we should get rid of the first creep rounds and just have you pick two random items - this would save like 3:30 a match.

looks like I called it These are some massive balance changes, Im pretty excited to play once I get home (sry, cant link the patch since Im at work pc which blocks gaming content)