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Competitive Analysis - Auto Chess
Auto Chess has evolved from addictive Dota 2 mod to addictive mobile game — provided you know how to get your hands on it. Is it worth the hassle?
Auto Chess, available on Android now via early access, is a full game version of a mod for Dota 2, itself a full game sequel of a mod for Warcraft 3, itself a full game sequel of a game called Warcraft 2 which…
A historical account
Look it's got a storied history, but at its core, Auto Chess is conceptually about five months old. And in that time it has taken the world by storm. Springing up as a mod at a perfect time for people who were bored with the meta of Hearthstone, strategy-focused-streamer after strategy-focused-streamer began playing it, teaching it and enjoying it. All it required was Dota 2 — a free game on Steam — and the workshop mod that Dota 2 itself was promoting for months after its launch.
To say it was a success is to undersell it. Peak players grew to the highest they'd been in two years — average players lifting to highs last seen in 2016. Dota 2 itself was still popular to the point that Valve still doesn't need ever to make Half-Life 3, but Auto Chess made it even more popular again.
Auto Chess released in January 2019, coinciding with a player number spike.
© SteamCharts.com
To say it was clunky is to undersell it as well. The first time I played it, I lost my first three rounds — gimme rounds, designed to let you build a team before engaging in PVP — because I couldn't work out which inane button combination I needed to press actually to deploy a character. Even after I'd sunk hours into it, I'd still occasionally devastate my strategy by clicking the wrong button and destroying my team's viability.
Auto Chess on mobile isn't clunky. It has a useful tutorial. It features dragging and dropping instead of hotkey deployment nonsense. It's actually pretty well made. It's still heavily based off the Dota 2 mod, but the heroes have slightly different names and artwork. Tusk is Tusk Champion. Enchantress is Unicorn. Ogre Mage is... Orge Mage.
A typical game told in pictures. First things first, don't get "Orge Mage".
© Joab Gilroy
But we're getting ahead of ourselves, because what Auto Chess is takes some explaining.
The sagest of chesses
Polo. You know that fancy pants sport for people who have horses? You could call that Riding Chess, and it would have as much to do with Chess as Auto Chess. Auto Chess shares precisely one thing in common with The King's Game — an 8 by 8 board on which all battles take place. Polo, in case you were wondering, shares one thing as well — horsies.
A game of Auto Chess sees you assigned a single 8x8 board and a single gold piece. You buy a chess (what heroes are called for reasons I haven't worked out), you deploy your hero to the board, and then you let it do battle. So far, so easy. Especially when you can drag and drop pieces, and you're not trying to memorise a bunch of inane hotkeys.
Round 1 begins, and your hero fights an AI chess in a battle you have no control over. Once deployed, your heroes do battle without any input from you — which might be why card game streamers took such a shine to the game. If at any point your auto-battling heroes die before the visitors to your board do, you lose 2hp damage for each enemy still standing. If your health pool reaches zero, you die (and lose).
You'll be pleased to know that I defeated sworn enemy blazin69 in round 5.
© Joab Gilroy
When Round 2 begins, you have 30 seconds to buy and deploy another hero, and this is where things start to get interesting. Heroes have affinities with one another, which buffs (and sometimes debuffs) them. Get three warriors on the board, and all your warriors will have plus five armour.
Get two 'Cave Clanners', and all Cave Clanners will have +250hp. Grabbing Redaxe Chief, whose name I will shorten to "Axe", early and adding a Swordman, who is a real Juggernaut of a hero, into the mix soon after means you'll have two Cave Clan Warriors, which means you need just one more Warrior to get a big helping of extra armour as well as bonus HP. These synergies only count for different heroes, by the way — grabbing two Axes won't earn you the buff.
Then there's the fact that you can combine heroes. If you get three Axes and you deploy them all at once, you'll combine them into a single two-star Axe who has twice the health and does twice the damage. This is important once you factor in deployment totals — you can only deploy heroes equal to your level, so if you're level three, you can only have three pieces on the board at once. Combining those three Axes to make a single piece frees up two spaces to start pursuing your Warrior synergies.
Down the rabbit hole
My team composition was good, so I stayed above 40 gold to get 4g interest.
© Joab Gilroy
There's your economy to think about — you earn money each round, but the amount you receive is based on an array of factors. You get a bonus for winning multiple rounds in a row, but you also earn one for losing a lot. If you're paying enough attention, you might sometimes be best off losing multiple rounds in a row to make sure you get your loss bonus — winning some rounds and losing others is a surefire way to put yourself at a disadvantage monetarily. You get 10% interest on your income based on how much gold you've got in the bank, so you'll get 1 extra gold if you've got 10, 2 for 20 and so on up to 50.
This means in most cases you'll want to save money to reach that 50 gold limit, and to start spending only once you've reached that number — provided you're maximising your win/loss bonuses as well.
You can reroll the heroes available to purchase each round for 2 gold a pop, you can buy levels for 5 gold per 4 XP — and the higher levels require lots of XP. Your positioning on the chess board can — and will — dramatically alter your success against your opponents and the creep waves. Knowing how to take advantage of your matchups will also change everything.
Dropped a few rounds early thanks to some unlucky rolls, but I'm back baby!
© Joab Gilroy
Heroes that have been purchased aren't available in the purchase pool, so if you're trying to build the three-star Axe of your dreams and your opponent has two two-star Axes already, you need to know that it's never gonna happen. The upside to this is that you can deliberately buy certain heroes just to lower their presence in the purchase pool. But you also need to manage your reserve hero space, because you can only have eight heroes in reserve at once.
This all might seem complicated, but that's only because it really is. And processing all of this inside of a 30-second clock is tricky, but highly addictive. It actually shares quite a lot in common with Battle Royale — the only difference is that the battle portion is entirely out of your hand.
Random Number Generators
RNG plays a massive role in Auto Chess, and it's mostly a good thing. With Loot Boxes never getting the item you want from raids, we're primarily accustomed to thinking of RNG as a bad thing. Being boned by RNG is something most gamers can relate to at one time or another.
But a lot of the most satisfying moments in games come from random chance. Battlefield moments — where you walk up over the crest of a hill only to see a Tiger tank turning its turret to face you, to then see it explode as a plane crashes into it by chance — are epic moments in games where random chance has allowed the unlikely to happen. They happen more often because there are more players, more locations and more opportunities in Battlefield, but I'm drifting off track.
But there's also a lot of other randomness that leads to general satisfaction in games. Dropping hot in Apex Legends, landing and finding only a Mozambique while an enemy is coming through the next door is definitely being boned by RNG. But if you decide to climb up and out of the hole in the roof to get away, you manage to loop to another house to grab an R99, and then you turn around and win the fight, then RNG just served you up a special moment, right on a platter.
In Bird culture playing both at once is considered a dick move.
© Joab Gilroy
RNG is bad when it's fixed. If you landed on a Mozambique and you weren't allowed to pick up another weapon for the rest of the game, that would be bad RNG. But because you're still able to make choices, because you can always choose to run away and try something different, RNG mitigation is in effect. You can mitigate RNG in a lot of ways. The direction you decide to run in is RNG mitigation. Deciding which next house to run to is RNG mitigation — if you run to one that has open doors, you're rolling the dice on whether it has already been looted. Not hot-dropping is RNG mitigation (but it's for chickens).
Auto Chess is all about RNG mitigation as well, which is what makes it so satisfying to play. Buying Axe early on and building a group of Warriors is a low-risk play that will probably allow you to win a bunch of early rounds, but there's a chance a lot of other players will build to it as well — reducing the pool of heroes for you to purchase.
Heroes have tiers, too, and the higher your level the more likely you are to see high tier heroes. At the highest levels of the game, RNG mitigation extends not only to buying the Legendary heroes you need, but those your opponents need to deny them access.
"Helicopter" is the first legendary chess available to me. Not for my team.
© Joab Gilroy
Knowing when to use your reserve space saving up for a three-star character is RNG mitigation as well — and knowing when to abandon your dreams of getting to three-stars is good too.
Items for deletion
Itemisation is where Auto Chess falls flat in this department. A 'true RNG' system, in that it is absolutely 100% random whether or not an item drops for you, it can dramatically alter the balance of Auto Chess for no reason other than the fact that Dota 2 has an item shop.
When it was a Dota 2 mod, it was obnoxious. Now that Auto Chess mobile is distinctly not related to Valve's Moba, it's nonsensical.
Items are bad for several reasons. First off — they add a layer of complexity to Auto Chess that just isn't needed. You can't remove an item from a hero once it has been assigned except by selling that hero, which means if you deploy an item early and want to pivot to a different team composition later, you're stuck until you entirely abandon your old strategy.
This is only my third item this game, so it's lucky that it combines.
© Joab Gilroy
The complexity is a boon in some people's eyes, as complexity can raise the skill ceiling and reward more experienced players — but items are bad at this too. They're straight buffs, which means players who luck their way into them have an advantage no matter what. If we get two Auto Kasparovs, the Auto Grandmasters of Auto Chess, and put them up against one another with identical team compositions, but we give one AK items and the other nothing, then the AK with items will win even if he puts them on the 'wrong' heroes.
In fact, nothing harms the competitive viability of Auto Chess more than this one factor, because it makes the game fundamentally unbalanced. I've won a few games now where I didn't get any items, but that's because I've played dozens of hours of Dota 2 Auto Chess and for other people, it is a new experience. I don't want to go down another 'I'm playing Krunker against children' rabbit hole, but you get the idea. Once I get up to playing against others of my level (think Bronze, but like high Bronze) items will matter.
There are a few ways they can fix this; by giving everyone the same items for clearing each wave or by adding an item shop (which I think would complicate things too much), to name a few. But the easiest way to rectify the problem items introduce is by removing them altogether. There's more than enough going on in Auto Chess without items.
It is I, the truely sage of chesses among all this eight.
© Joab Gilroy
I mean with everything I've mentioned, I didn't talk about how vital positioning is, how crucial specific hero knowledge is (for knowing about AOEs, Crowd Control specials and more), how critical minute factors of economy management are…
There's a lot of mental exercise happening at any time in a game of Auto Chess. It can be tricky keeping track of all the moving pieces, and it can sometimes take a while before you even realise you've lost. It's a deceptively intense game.
What makes it work so damn well is that everything obeys a set of rules. Which means over time, you can learn those rules, meaning every win and every loss is an opportunity to grow within the game. It's the essence of a great competitive experience, and Auto Chess delivers it fantastically. It just needs to get rid of items.
You can play Auto Chess by heading to the Google Play Store and searching for, uh, Auto Chess. If you're on IOS I'm afraid you'll have to wait, but you can play the Dota 2 mod by downloading Steam, then Dota 2, then Auto Chess in the Arcade.
