Dota Underlords - Valve's Auto Chess

Since there was no specific thread on this game yet I’ll make one for this too.

Underlords is Valve’s take on the Auto Chess genre.
It is currently in Battle Pass Beta (Dota premium subscription thingy) and is expected to go into open F2P beta this week or next.
I’m looking forward to seeing what developers can do with the young genre.

Underlords is built as a mobile game first and foremost. The initial beta was visibly mobile based especially regarding the UI (also shown in the video below).
Valve very quickly added a more PC viable UI variant though. (Didn’t find a good introductory video with it, you can google it or check on Twitch to see the difference)

Yeah, the updates over the last few days have made it much easier to deal with on PC

I have started playing this too by buying the battle pass. I don’t play DOTA 2, but I have gotten so much entertainment from The International over the years it’s only fair that I chipped in a bit.

So far I am really enjoying it, it’s still very early in terms of features but the core game is so addictive it still makes sense to jump in now in my opinion. It’s a very close adaptation in everything except items, which is much improved here, and so even though I really like the game I am not paying a compliment to the Valve devs so much as the original mod creators. It will be interesting to see over the coming months how the Valve devs expand and improve on what’s here.

Something else I like is that there are bot matches, and that you can skip the in-between turn timers if you’re ready to start the next round, so matches tend to go faster.

This is the one I expect to end up playing. TFT is the ugliest of the lot, and doesn’t look like they streamlined the UI enough.

I would probably have plunked down for the battle pass except I’m still a bit sore about Artifact…

I was saying this earlier. The board looks pretty bad

I saw JM stream this last night. Set your guys and gals up and then hit play. Looked decent but hard. I thought the graphics were functional though I didn’t understand half of what I was looking at. So I asked a million questions like a 4 year old… I am actually considering giving it a try. I like the idea of strategic planning, and even tactical planning, then letting the battle go.

I love auto battle games…just give me a deep enough strategic and tactical portion of the game and auto battle away. I’m enjoying this although I suck at it so far.

This pretty much boils down to 2 things. 1. Knowing what the strongest combos are based on how other people are building. 2. RNG allowing you to put that combo of units together. Seems pretty fun. Simple on the surface, but a ton of strategy based on what others are doing.

This is true, but I think the most important point is knowing the strongest combos/strategies that you can employ given what RNG hands you each round. Tailoring your strat and board placement to counter what other teams are doing only really matters in the latter half of the match and is not required to win (except at high levels of play).

I think one of the avenues to improve this genre is to make your strategies more dependent on the other players, and the first way to do this is to cut the number of people in a match from 8 to maybe 5. There’s just too much going on in between rounds to also have an idea what 7 other people are doing.

Every Dota battle pass owner got three keys for Underlords to give away today. Somewhere in the Dota 2 client.
It’s only a couple of days earlier access but still neat.

Anyone have a key they would be willing to share?

@buzznaut I sent you one.

I have two spare keys left.

!!! /forum grovelling!

@Ultrazen I assumed that was a request. Pass on the key if I misunderstood.

One left.

I’d love one. :P

Yes thanks a ton!

May I have another? 😅

@Therlun sent.

Thank you