What is Dota Auto Chess?
Dota Auto Chess is a Custom Game which was made by using the Steam Workshop Tools. It was created by 5 individuals as stated in the description of the game – Cutey, Pucky, Nat, Mouse and Toto. The game rapidly became successful and has a community of its own now. Dota Auto Chess can be described as a Turn-based Strategy Game where you play against seven other players. Although many turn-based games require a certain level of skill and APM, Dota Auto Chess is completely strategy based, and it mainly requires resource management and decision-making skills.
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The Game’s popularity.
If one can trust the internal tracking feature of the Dota 2 client, Dota Auto Chess has almost 175,000 concurrent players constantly. Although there is a lot of talk about how these numbers are not really accurate, it is a huge achievement for the game creators since there hasn’t been any other Dota custom game in the past with this sort of success.
The game is currently so popular that many gamers who have never played Dota before, are downloading the game just to play Dota Auto Chess. As someone who used to play Dota 1 through the Warcraft III client, this brings out a lot of nostalgic feelings. Many variety streamers on Twitch like Forsen and itsHafu have also started playing the game on stream. If you open up the game directory for Dota 2 on Twitch, you will notice that half of them or more are playing Dota Auto Chess instead of Dota itself.
How does the game work?
At the beginning of the game, the player has to select a single hero from a choice of 5. As the game progresses, your options will rapidly increase, as hero choices and the population cap grows bigger. The player can pick any hero as long as he has the gold for it and the space for it on the board. All the heroes have one of their abilities from Dota 2, and that ability determines how good the hero is in the game. Every hero in the game falls into two categories – Species and Class. There are currently 13 species, 10 classes and a total of 52 heroes. For example, Axe has Orc and Warrior as his species and class respectively.
The defining structure of the game is that – When heroes of the same species and class are put together on the board, they have powerful synergy. For example, 4 Mechs give 25 HP regen to all friendly Mechs, while 3 Goblins increase armor and HP regeneration by 15 for a random ally.
Hence most of the strategizing depends on the categories into which the heroes are divided.
The next concept is ranking up your units. To rank up, you’ll need three units of the same hero. Ranking up becomes more difficult if everyone in the game is trying to play the same races/classes, hence it is beneficial to try and choose lesser-played characters in order to rank them up easier.
While trying to get your strategy up and running, you will also need to keep a check on your Gold. Gold can be earned in three ways in Dota Auto Chess:
1) Defeating an opponent gives you 1 Gold
2) Having a winning streak or losing streak (yes, losing streak) can get you up to 3 Gold
3) Every round you get interest, which is 10% of the Gold you currently have.
Each round you face a random opponent from whoever is remaining in the game, and you win the game when there’s no one else left standing. I will be making a more in-depth guide for more advanced strategies and tactics, so be sure to check that one out.
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