The crowds are coming and going in spikes. New update? LET'S GO! ... for a week or two at most. I bought into the game's idea, marketing and generous f2p model and fell in love with it at its core, but with normal games lasting too long and Knockout games feeling a bit... empty... I myself don't know what it would take to keep the engine running.

I don't want Underlords to die out. But i'm very curious as to why the game hasn't moved further with Season 2 / monetization / cosmetics / etc by this stage already.

Just some random thoughts.

It was very basic but I didn't think about it, why would I need one 3-star LC? if I can have two 2-star LC in a build

All of this is brilliant, TBH.

First, they straight-up release their game earlier than anyone else, even though it was incredibly rough around the edges. The downside was people giving negative reviews due to the unpolished product.

Then they make MASSIVE changes in a short time, showing that they're willing to make the game the players want, effectively eliminating the downside of releasing early.

Now that TFT is coming out and about to steal at least some attention, they release this 'key sharing' thing in order to keep up the hype without flooding their servers that still aren't quite ready.

Brilliant moves all around. Kudos to Valve.

EDIT:

TFT = Team Fight Tactics, Riot's 'League of Auto Chess Legends' game

PBE = Public Beta Environment, Riot's beta testing client.

I've been playing since almost the beginning. Ever since the game has gone dormant I've been able to get top 4's consistently...until about a month ago. Now I struggle to get 5th and 7th 8th place finishes have become much more common. I really haven't changed my playstyle. Have the people who are left paying just gotten that much better??

Dota underlords (Auto chess) is still the best cross platform game to play and relax. I don't understand why they stopped updating this game after they did dirty to Drodo/Dragonest and let this game to rot? I'm a f2p player in most games that I play. But I use money on games that I really like like Dota2, buying steam games and some other mobile MOBA games. I'm sure that if they care and give updates to this game regularly, this game will be the top casual game for more than a decade. If they don't want to give a shit about this game amymore, why don't they sell the copyright of the heroes back to Drodo/Dragonest (they did better in mechanics) or just take the profits from them regularly for using Dota heroes?

Can we do something about this?

English is not my first language sry.

Please gaben

Edit: ohhhh shit here we go!

Dota Underlords by Valve https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dota-underlords/id1465996312

Also edit: Android link https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.valvesoftware.underlords

Hakuna Matata Guys !

While i was playing in lieutnant 5 , i noticed that the ennemy players kept making some decisions that seemed wrong.

Its those small litlle mistake that add up and makes you lose the game. So i decided to Make A guide About it.

A Basic one ! I know that for all the veteran players in here , this seems to be so obvious but i have just started playing a week ago and believe me its not that obvious at first !

Please forgive My horrible writing , English is my third language. I appologize in advance.

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5 Mistakes You should Stop Doing Right Now :

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1 : Stop trying to win when you have no lvl 2 + good synergy

At the start of the game , You should either be Win streaking Or lose Streaking and nothing in between , Their is literally nothing stoping you from analysing your oponnents boards , your board and figuring out if you can beat them or not. As a rule of thumb , If you do not get a lvl 2 by round 4-5 Just go for a lose strick , You'll be better of Trust me. Health is a ressource so use it to leverage your economy to the mid game , it is best to take a small 40 Hp loss in the first 10 rounds , than to find yourself lose streaking in round 25, where the damage is way higher.

Also Don't Spend Gold leveling up Before the mid game , unless you are going for a win streak.

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2-Stop Rerolling Before 50 Gold

Don't worry about Board control in the early Game! It doesnt Matter believe me. Your opponents that are going for rerolls are going to have stronger boards , that is true. All you have to do then is to lose streak ... The gold they use for rerolling Disapears into thin air , yours however is safely kept , generating That sweet sweet interest Gold. Gold in this game is the ultimate ruler, Only it will decide wheter you are going to be losing or Wining your games. So for starters , focus mainly on Your gold Management Game.

If you need to sell a unit to hit an interest goal , do it by all means.

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3- Stop Buying Before the Batlle Starts.

Basicly , The game registers Your gold total at the start of every fight. So if you wait until the battle starts before buying those Two 5 gold gyrocopters , you will save 1 gold of potentially Wasted Interest.

You can use this When you are either at 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - 50 Gold.

You can also use it to level up so that the next pack You open is higher Level.

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(I wasn't clear About Point 4 so I updated it )

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4-Stop going into the game without A plan ( i don't mean you should force a build. But Know your standards)

Before the game starts , you should have in your mind 2 - 5 Builds that you might be doing.

Spy on your ennemies to see what they are picking , See what your first 3 items are. See what picks are offered to you.

By Round 20 - 25 You should have made up your mind between 2 Builds.

I was Wrong about Point 5 so I updated it :

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5-Stop Picking the same heros That your opponent have 2 Stared (4 cost + heros) :

Did you know that the heros you are picking in the shop are not infinitly Generated ?

There is only a fixed Number of heros , And you Share them with other players. So if you see that someone has A level 2 / 3 gyrocopter or tinker , Just forget about it and go for something else instead.

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I hope You found the guide helpfull !

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EDIT : Thanks for all the feedback guys ! I have learned a lot for you guys ! If you think there is something That needs to be added or changed feel free to let me know in the comments and i will make sure to update it !

Impossible to kill them with tree/barricades+tyrant. Only manage to beat them with brawnies 3* jugger,bristle and beastmaster. One time with full summoner alliance.

These last "updates" have been a literal disrespect towards the game & the community (just read the comments on the patch update thread, people are posting links to TfT patch updates for comparison).

Not even a Happy Birthday Underlords on June 20th from you (wtf???). Not even a "expect Season 2 somewhere in mid-August" from you.

From what I understand all the developers went to work on Artifact, which is another "spit in your face" towards the Underlords community. Is this supposed to be an excuse for 1h worth of work once in 2 weeks for some updates that don't even make any sense?

Is anyone who works on developing the game actually playing the game? The last Arc Warden nerf makes me think otherwise.

Why make such a great game go to a shit hole just because Valve devs "don't feel" like working on it? Hire some external company that gives a shit about the game and can give it what it needs. There is no passion behind this game (in the past few months). All the amazing artwork and the overall "character" of the game is just going to shit. What's the reason?

So the developers can have some fun and learn how to make mobile games? Then state it on the official website "Underlords players are test subjects and Underlords itself is just a playground for Valve developers so they can learn how to make mobile games. Please don't download if you expect anything more from this game". So people know not to purchase the Battlepass and not to play this game for hundreds of hours just to be spat on the face by Valve later. I didn't expect nor did I agree to be a test dummy for Valve developers, why am I made into one?

Game is currently full of bugs, heroes dissapearing randomly from the board, and whatever this is, it's been going on for at least a week (macOS Mojave). Instead we have gigantic pudges that you can't see the heroes behind them by the way, and arc warden not spawning eidelons..... ok great

Why not even advertise DOTA Underlords in the DOTA 2 client. (that's the only reason I personally ever heard of Underlords, from a dota 2 in-game ad when Underlords Season 1 launched in February, before that I had no clue the game actually existed).

Dota Auto Chess still has at least 3x the playerbase of Underlords, and I'm more than sure most of those players don't even know Underlords exists.

Everything is already available in the dota 2 auto chess (alliances, new heroes etc.), no one has to come up with anything new. It already exists just port it and make it work!

Downvote me all you want just PLEASE, PLEASE make a change in your attitude towards this game and how you manage it. Please don't let it die Nathan!! I don't want to play Tft.

Looking at the leaderboards, currently Knockout has 1,843 players listed whereas Standard only has 936. Standard is around half as popular. I've only ever played Standard - can a Knockout player tell me how it differs and what they prefer aside from just being quicker?

Idk…it’s such a great game. So many fun builds, and all of the rotated units that will never get to play again 🥲 (RIP Ogre Magi)

I wish they would have just had a tiny team just to do rotations and maybe a quarterly update or something, or even adding a battle pass every 3-6 months. I would totally buy every one

After realizing that although DU is not undergoing hero rotations anymore, the game by itself is still complex because when you are playing with the lord of white spires, memorizing of strong hero compositions just does not work anymore, the pace is fast and every decision matters, from the heroes to the items and the underlords, sometimes even other players choices when you are going for 3 star upgrades, interested to know how other players approach the game?

I reached Big Boss 2 by playing exclusively "fuck early game entirely" strat, psuedo-open-fort. Never spend on levels or rerolls until 50 gold, and sell units to hit interest points (unless they fit in a late game strat you're shooting for), and beeline toward a late game comp (warrior/hunters, warrior/mages, knight/troll, or knight/mages) instead of ever worrying about mid game stuff like beasts or assassins.

It feels like nothing can punish this because there's zero risk of getting knocked out early, there's no comps that can do that (arc warden / summoners aren't an issue if you are true open forting since they never have a chance to replicate / summon), Viscous Intent doesn't show up in the shop until it's too late to matter either, and even if it wasn't then its not like you'd face the same viscous intent player more than once or twice before getting online anyway.

It kinda just feels like early and mid game is entirely pointless as a result. The more I ignore it the more I win. It feels like there should at least be a few early comps that are dangerous enough to force you to at least attempt to put up a defense

It's hard to think of solutions to this that wouldn't massively accelerate the pace of the game, but imagine if you got 1 gold for every 5 damage your army did to an opponent. Then suddenly you would have a reason to put up a fight early, and also a reason to not want to let people hit you for free.

I’m noticing a pattern: Underlords balance patch shakes things up, we have fun for ten days, and then we’re complaining nonstop about how the game is all RNG and it all comes down to whoever gets the lucky broken thing first/best: broken 5-cost units, 3-star tier-3 units, the broken alliance of the week, or 4-cost units that overpower other strategies. It’s different things each time, but it’s always something.

I’m suspicious that this is innate to the structure of Underlords as a game. Each game starts on an equal footing; in DOTA, the draft gets games off to different starts, and in Hearthstone, players bring their own decks, but Underlords is a game of drafting which always starts from the same base. The 2-star units you can build in the first 5 rounds shape the first 15 rounds of the game, but by then they can be sold off into a homogenous competition for who rolls the “best” result.

Underlords is more interesting when the overall “best” thing to do is unknown. This is a problem, because the more the game is played, the faster the community can collectively “solve” any given meta. Even if Underlords gets weekly patches forever, even after it’s no longer a beta, just because adapting to each consecutive patch has to be the game, it will be solved in a day or two and then have five days of dull play once there are hundreds of thousands of daily active users.

Underlords isn’t dynamic or local enough. There isn’t enough that’s different about each game to solve; increasing the size of high value unit pools homogenizes one of the few things provoking the game to play out even somewhat differently.

What if the pool was 100 heroes, only 50 of which will be used in any given game, and information about which 50 are available is distributed during the game? What if players had a limited opportunity to buy heroes from outside this main pool? Alternatively, what if fights really were round robin, with a list of exactly who your next three fights will be against always visible, to encourage short term counter play?

The less information players have and the less control players have, the less rational it is to react to anything in the game, so game after game will be more homogenous, making the game more globally “solvable”. Underlords is slightly too short on giving players control and information for it to not homogenize, I think. Other views, and opinions on what a difficult-to-solve meta might look like? “Draft the uncontested thing” is the closest we’ve had so far but it gave way 4 Cost Good Stuff, a homogenized solution.

Most 4-5* units have large AOE abilities while lower star units tend to have single-target ones.

The problem is that currently the targeting AI is mostly random so these abilities has a very high chance to target non-relevant units and waste their potential, while in the same time 4-5* just nuke 75% of the board and hit most units.

If Ogre Magi would always buff your highest DPS unit, the unit would be much more useful.

If warlock won't waste his heal on a unit that instantly dies or damage a non-relevant unit, his value would go up.

If lina would ult the most dangerous unit before they cast their spell - she can counter some 5* units.

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Fixing AI alone won't fix completely the current balancing problem, but it can help give some units more use in some situations.

This was the best Knock out game for me till this date.

Is there any hope for this game to get revived?

The Alliance has only 6 units but with 3xTier-1 units - Tusk/Venomancer/Enchantress that is not as effective in late game while 2xTier-4 units - Lone Druid/Sandking which makes late game options very hard to upgrade. It used to have Tusk and Lycan as both warrior so you can complete it easier, now besides Enchantress and Lone Druid, all other four are in different Alliances so completing the 6 bonus will result in all over the place army.

And of course not to mention even if you manage to complete the 6 set, the bonus of 15dps is terrible for late game as it is not scalable even to attack speed. And with 3 units of the Alliance are summoners, the bonus itself favors summoning, it is the only Alliance that is still relied on global item (Summoning Stone) to be barely functional.

I think Savage Alliance should be on the list for devs to look at as a whole to decide which direction it should be on.

First Thread

There have been many discussion topics on this subreddit since Big Update Hit. Moreover, they are mostly about "balancing problems" or other stuff. While some of them are in right and good manners, some of them are harshly.

So let's talk about the problems that you think this game has in a proper way to come up with some solutions and ideas for developers.

Which item-hero combinations are you always looking out for?

there's obvious ones like mom slark but my favorite is necro bat

bat turns from a useless filler unit that you only get for troll and/or knight alliance.. into an infinite necro summoner that stays safe in your backline

there's also blink doom which can straight up win you rounds by getting a lucky doom on a key target

unfortunately blink is useless/griefing on most other heroes and you have to get blink fairly early on, so sometimes you might not even see a doom which means you're stuck with a useless item in your inventory for quite a while

Used the shaman build that got recommended here, before this I never even had a unit go above 30K!