I’m in a good place with Dota Underlords. We’re long past that initial rush, those halcyon days where layers of the puzzle kept peeling away, one after the other. We’re past the rough patch, too, when it seemed like we were over. That long plateau. We’re comfortable, now. I can see the path that leads from here, the subtle ways I can improve.

So what if the spark’s gone? I’ve settled for less.

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After almost eight months in early access, Valve have revealed the full release date for Dota Underlords – February 25th. This will mark the start of the game’s first season, introduce a full battle pass, a new meta, and brand new content. Oh, and a new Underlord was added to the game like, last night.

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Few realised at the time, but last January we witnessed the birth of a genre. Dota Auto Chess shot to the top of Dota 2’s custom games, enticing MOBA players with wizarding army management. The big names took notice. By June we had Riot’s Teamfight Tactics and Valve’s Dota Underlords, squaring off against each other. An unknown number of millions flocked to TFT, while Dunderlords hit 200,000 peak concurrent players.

Six months later, Teamfight Tactics seems relatively stable, while Dota Underlords is dropping fast. We normally don’t pay player numbers much heed, but given autobattlers were last year’s big new genre and Dota and League Of Legends are both long-term titans, it’s hard not to ask the question: how come?

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The undertown is nearly ready. Its Dota Underlords are chomping at the bit, a mere month away from the point where Valve go ‘yep, that’s version 1.0’ and bury the early access label on their wizarding general simulator. They say all this in their post about yesterday’s update, a smaller affair aimed at reducing misclicks, fixing bugs, and delivering the usual round of balance tweaks.

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A lizard-riding auntie with a shotgun and an incarnation of aether today arrived in Dota 2 and Dota Underlords in matching Outlanders Updates. Snapfire and Void Spirit are the two new heroes announced at The International in August, and here they are in both games now. They’re accompanied by big updates for each, with Dota 2 adding new buildings and dozens of new items and Underlords adding a new quick-paced mode plus the other Spirit heroes. These patch notes sure are a lot to take in. Damn, Dota.

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The Underlords of Dota Underlords are no longer a naming flourish, today becoming actual units leading our armies with handy perks and abilities. Valve name today’s update The Big Update because, well, it is. Along with the first two Underlords, it adds new heroes from Dota 2 and new Alliances with new bonuses. A Duos mode has arrived too, with teams who can play on separate boards but can give heroes and gold – and share a life total. Things. Lots of things. A big update. The Big Update.

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I presumed Dota Underlords was already set in some sort of dungeon, so it pleases me that Valve will soon add an additional prison. This is just one part of the upcoming Big Update, which will add a buncha new heroes while substantially changing how the game works. Valve will be jailing 8-12 random heroes each day in an attempt to keep things fresh, but ensuring that all alliances can still be completed. It sounds like a neat way of keeping people on their toes, and makes the job of anyone writing guides for this often inscrutable auto-battler even harder. My thoughts are with Ollie in this trying time.

On closer inspection Dunderlords takes place in an underground town, and my prejudices clearly need to be kept in check. Let us look at these upcoming heroes with the respect they are due.

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Dota Underlords builds are wondrously complex and finnicky beasts. Combining your knowledge not just of heroes and abilities and items and alliances, but also the pacing of a match and your relative needs on different rounds can all get pretty mind-boggling pretty quickly – especially now that you also have to factor in the new Ace Tier heroes and effects with versions #245 and later.

So we thought it’d be a good idea to revisit our Dota Underlords builds guide to see what still works and what no longer does. Below we’ve put together seven of the very best builds heading into October, from Knights and Dragons to Savage Trolls, and many more.

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The carefully crafted selection of Dota Underlords alliances available to you each match is one of the game’s defining features. Just as much as deciding which heroes to use, where to position them, and which items to equip yourself with, your combination of alliances will decide who lives and who dies on the 8×8 battlefield.

With all the minor and major updates that have happened to various alliances and heroes recently, we thought it best to go back over our Dota Underlords alliances guide and let you in on which alliances are faring the best overall in the current meta.

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It’s gone a bit quiet down in Dota Underlords. Valve’s autobattler hasn’t received a chunky update for a few weeks, with team-battle tacticians left to twiddle their thumbs while the meta stagnates. Last night’s patch made Arc Warden a bit weaker and poked at a handful of other numbers, but I’m more interested in Valve’s explanation for why update’s have slowed down a tad. It’s apparently because they’ve got “The Big Update” penned for the first half of October, which will bring “2 playable Underlords, the Duos team mode, 6 new Heroes, 3 new Alliances, and an updated user interface.”

“Underlords” are not currently a thing in Dota Underlords, and there is next to no information about what one is. Intriguing.

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