Dota Underlords

Dota Underlords

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Basic Tips & Tricks
By Yamgent Jembargan ヤムジェント・ジェンバーガン and 2 collaborators
You have just gone through the tutorial, but there are actually more tricks you can do to maximize your chances of winning!

We highlight some features and strategies to help you up your game further.
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Managing your Gold Economy
Interest
Gold can accumulate interests, so keep as much gold in your reserve as possible, rather than spending them on re-rolls early in the game.

Interest is 10% of your total gold (capped at 50), and is rounded down (so 19 gold = 1 interest). The interest that you will receive next turn is calculated immediately after the combat starts. This means you can spend money thereafter without affecting your next turn's interest. This is important - if you are not in a rush to get the hero, don't buy straightaway! Instead, maintain your total gold above 50 before combat starts, then spend to your own desire.

Note that if you win the combat, you are rewarded with 1 additional gold at the end. This additional gold is considered part of your total gold when calculating interest. For example, before combat start, you have 19 gold, and you win the combat later on, your interest would be 2 gold (19 + 1 = 20).

How to Spend
On early rounds, it may be worth spending gold to buy 4XPs in order to level up quicker, especially if you are falling behind your opponents. A good round to spend gold for 4XP is round 5 - if you don't need to buy heroes, you can gain a level straight away to place more from your bench.

When you are at 3XP for any particular level, after the combat starts, you can spend your money to get to 7/8, or 15/16, or 23/24 etc... This allow you access to the next tier's heroes in your shop for the next round immediately without affecting interest (you gain 1XP automatically per round).

On later rounds, once you have accumulate gold, re-rolls would be much more worth it. This is especially true since you gain access to higher tiers heroes in your shop as you level up.

Winning and Losing Streaks
Remember that win streaks and lose streaks give you additional gold. Therefore, consistency is important. If you are losing, you may want to deliberately continue losing unless you are confident that you can make a comeback.

The additional gold gain for lose streaks are:
  • 3/4 losses - 1 gold
  • 5+ losses - 2 gold
The additional gold gain for win streaks are:
  • 3/4 wins - 1 gold
  • 5/6 wins - 2 gold
  • 7 wins - 3 gold
  • 8 wins - 4 gold

Note: Win streaks will reset at 8 wins.

Of course, losing doesn't mean you let your opponent relentlessly wreck you. Minimize the damage received by wiping most of their troops. Remember that the final damage to your health is calculated by summing up all of the stars of your opponent's remaining army (excluding summoned heroes) + base damage (e.g. round 11 onwards includes 1 base damage).
Spying Other Players
You can view other players' boards by clicking their nameplates on the left of the screen:


Almost everything in your opponent's screen can be revealed this way! You can see their heroes on their chessboard and bench, the total amount of gold that they have, their XP, their active alliances, their combat performances etc.

You should periodically check your opponents' boards to see if their heroes' active alliances counter yours. For example, if many players are using the "Demon Hunter" alliance, and your army is heavily reliant on Demons to deal damage, it is perhaps time to change your army's composition.
Understanding the Global Shopping Pool
Heroes that appears in your shop are drawn randomly, based on a global pool shared by all players. This means that if your opponents have bought up many copies of a particular hero, you are less likely to see it in your shop.

A general advice is to be more flexible with your alliance strategy, and be willing to change it if your alliance's pool runs dry (or if the RNG god is against you). Always view your opponents' screen to see their boards and benches, in order to check if they are buying off heroes that you were looking for.

If you level up fast enough, you will have earlier access to higher-tier heroes compared to other players, and can buy them off the pool!
Positioning your Heroes
Your army can be positioned anywhere at the bottom 8x4 squares. Use that to your advantage! Put weaker heroes at the back, while letting your tanky heroes man the frontline. This reduces the chance of your weaker heroes getting wiped out early in the fight.

Some players like to clump all of their heroes at the corner of the board to protect against pesky teleporting heroes (e.,g. Queen of Pain) that teleports behind your army.
Checking your Army Alliance Composition
Quickly view the composition of your army, by utilizing the icons in the Alliances tab. By clicking on an alliance's icon, this will highlight the heroes (both on your board and on your bench) that are associated with that particular alliance. This allows you to quickly form your desired alliance synergies, especially if you are new to the heroes and don't remember their alliances.


Remember that only unique heroes affect your alliances. In other words, if you have 2 Tusks on your board, they count as 1 Warrior for your Warrior alliance, not 2 Warriors!

To make it easier to see such duplicates, heroes that affect the alliances are shown in a bold rectangular outlined highlight, while duplicate heroes that do not affect the alliances are shown in a lighter highlight:


Dragging a hero on the board will also render a line that connects the dragged hero's with other heroes that shares the same alliance. Unfortunately this may not be very convenient for color-blind users :(.

Maximizing your Looting Rounds
Loot rounds are when you battle the AI instead of another human player. Loot rounds happen at round 1, 2, 3, 10, and intervals of 5 thereafter (i.e. 15, 20, 25, ... up to 50).

You do not take damage during loot rounds (and hence it does not affect your win and lose streaks), so it is best that you compose your army to win them, because if you lose a loot round, you will not have access to the next tier loots (instead, you will be offered old loots). Loot items are generally quite powerful, so don't waste the chance to pick the most suitable one for your composition.

You may want to consider using a special position for your heroes during loot rounds (such that melee heroes are at the front).
Taming the RNG
A common complaint about this game is that RNG plays a big factor. While it can be frustrating, the best you can do to prepare, is to plan ahead of the different possible alliance compositions that you can create for your army.

This will require you to learn about the different heroes in this game, and how many heroes are assigned to an alliance (you can access those information in the in-game guide). This will allow you to calculate the probability of getting certain heroes. Again, be flexible with your army composition if necessary.
Using Keyboard Shortcuts
Yes, they exist.

You can use the keyboard to access different corners of the UI, rather than having to move your mouse across the screen.

The default keys are:

Shop
  • Open/close shop: Space
  • Buy any of the 5 items: 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5
  • Reroll: R
  • Lock: Q
  • Gain 4XP with 5 Gold: T
Right-Side Info Tabs
  • Show alliance tab: P
  • Show DPS tab: O
  • Show items tab: I
Your Board
  • Sell selected unit: E
  • Send unit from board to bench: W
Cycling through Other Player's Board
  • Go to the next player's board: Tab
  • View opponent's board (that your army is defending): S
  • View opponent's board (that your army is attacking): A
  • Jump back to your own board: F1

Don't worry if there's too many shortcuts. You can (1) remember the most essential ones, personally the shop hotkeys are pretty useful, and (2) change the keybindings, by going to SettingsHotkeys.
Other Common Questions
How do you increase the stars of your unit?

You increase your stars by merging 3 same units of the previous level in your possession (so they can be on the board, or on the bench as well).

The merging is automatic, and will happen as soon as you have the correct units in possession.

For example:
Tusk ⭐ + Tusk ⭐ + Tusk ⭐ = Tusk ⭐⭐
Tusk ⭐⭐ + Tusk ⭐⭐ + Tusk ⭐⭐ = Tusk ⭐⭐⭐
The End
Thank you for reading this guide. We hope that you learnt something useful from it.

Credits
Like the community, we are also learning the game as it evolves. Sometimes, we may miss an important feature or two, or may make some typos and errors.

We are grateful to everyone in the community who have provided support and valuable feedback to the guide.

We also thank:
  • @Stupend0uS - for spotting the typo in the percentage of interest.
  • @rymkylla - for mentioning that the 1 gold gained for victory in combat phase is added to the calculation of the interest.
  • @Phoenix Wright - for mentioning the updated winning/losing streak.
25 Comments
Instigator 30 Dec, 2021 @ 11:13pm 
kewl
The Rocky 3 Apr, 2021 @ 9:55am 
Nice
A^√𶥩®£™ 28 Jun, 2020 @ 4:59pm 
Esta vien
yuuppiin 28 Dec, 2019 @ 4:43am 
Thanks!
Wot? 2 Nov, 2019 @ 6:44pm 
@blind3rdeye

it's truly random. in my experience it SEEMS to target heroes you have duplicates of but i have 0% solid proof on that. i just notice often it will sell off a 2 star something, when i have another of the same 2 star on my bench
blind3rdeye 7 Aug, 2019 @ 4:28pm 
If I have to many units on the board when the round start, and my bench is full too, what happens? I assume that something gets auto-sold so that units can be removed from the board; but which units?
Koyotl 17 Jul, 2019 @ 8:49pm 
Thanks
Of course, you do not have to put all 3 units on the board for them to merge. You can keep the duplicates on the bench as well.
You increase your stars by having 3 same units of the previous level.

For example:
Tusk ⭐ + Tusk ⭐ + Tusk ⭐ = Tusk ⭐⭐
Tusk ⭐⭐ + Tusk ⭐⭐ + Tusk ⭐⭐ = Tusk ⭐⭐⭐
Koyotl 17 Jul, 2019 @ 6:48pm 
how do you increase your stars