Dota – The Siltbreaker: Act 1, how to win

To start off, I suggest taking a look at this list that ranks each and every Dota hero by "difficulty" to play, based on six main areas of Dota "knowledge":

1. Hero/Item Knowledge
2. Map Awareness
3. Positioning/Reflex
4. Farm/Last-hitting
5. Micro Management
6. Survival Priority

I would say that this list is a nice guide to reference if you are looking for heroes to play based on your various areas of familiarity with the game (for example, you can sort heroes by their map awareness rating if you think you aren't very good at it).

In general, heroes with an escape mechanism, a stun or disable of some sort, and aren't very farm dependent make for the easiest heroes to pick up and play in my opinion. These heroes tend to usually be Intelligence heroes and often play a support role, although there are some exceptions.

Some examples:

• Venomancer: An Agility support hero that has a multitude of skills that damage and/or slow enemy units. Venomancer's wards can allow you to push/farm a lane pretty safely, and his passive slow and gale can be used to gank enemy heroes pretty effectively. Venomancer is not very farm dependent, and his ultimate can do devastating damage to enemy heroes. Make sure to safe his Poison Nova ultimate for team fights, or at times where you can hit multiple enemy heroes at once (and have someone to help you take them down). Like the other heroes mentioned below, he has poor HP and mobility.

• Vengeful Spirit: An Agility support hero with a decently ranged and damaging stun, a low cost armor reducing "wave" spell, a damage aura, and a situational ultimate that swaps the position of you and your target. In team battles or during ganks, you should be focusing on stunning an enemy and reducing their armor with your wave. Her "Swap" skill should be used to initiate ganks, or to pre-empt a team fight by taking out one of the enemy heroes to give you an advantage. Since Swap can potentially put you in danger, however, you need to be careful when to use it. You can also use Swap on an allied hero to save them, although you may end up sacrificing yourself as a result. VS's weaknesses are low HP, mobility, and a low mana pool, although getting Mana boots on her can solve that issue.

• Crystal Maiden: She has a stun, a slowing nuke, and an aura that gives global mana regen to you and all heroes. A very useful hero that can support and set up ganks when coming from the jungle, or just a hero that can harass the enemies in lane while babysitting (protecting) a carry. Her weaknesses are her low HP, slow movement speed, the fact that she has to stand still while casting her ult, and the fact that her abilities don't scale well into late game. That being said, even if you yourself are having a bad game and end up getting underleveled, her aura still makes her useful to allies.

• Lion: He has a stun, a hex, a mana draining skill, and a very powerful nuking ultimate. The fact that he has two disables makes him incredibly useful as a lane ally as well as in team fights. Like Crystal Maiden, he has the same weaknesses such as slow movement speed and low HP. He also has mana issues, since his spells have large costs. Depending on how you build him, however, you can sustain your mana reasonably. For example, skill impale and mana drain early. In lane, you can harass heroes by impaling them followed by casting mana drain on them. Alternatively, you can harass with impale, then use mana drain on the ranged creep to replenish mana a little bit more safely.

• Lich: Another support that has a slowing nuke similar to Crystal Maiden's, a Frost Armor skill that lets you buff allies with armor, a skill that lets you sacrifice an allied creep to gain mana, and an ultimate that is a nuke that bounces between any nearby enemy units. Like CM, he can be useful to set up ganks or to babysit carries, and like Lion he can sustain his mana by using his creep sacrificing skill. He has low HP and can have mana issues. His ultimate can be hard to aim correctly as it is a situational skill, but when in doubt, you can always cast it on an enemy hero as an extra nuke, or just cast it on a hero during a team fight.

• Skeleton King: A tanky carry that has a stun, a passive critical, a life leech aura, and an ultimate that uses mana to resurrect him should he die (the ultimate has a cooldown so you can't just keep resurrecting over and over immediately). Like yx. said, you really only have one skill, which is your stun. Use it to chase down enemy heroes, or to get yourself out of a tight situation such as a gank. His passives make it very easy for him to kill jungle creeps. He suffers from a low mana pool, slow movement speed, and low mobility in general (after your stun, many heroes are capable of running away from you).

• Sven: A tanky carry similar to Skeleton King in the fact that he has a stun (except this one hits in a small AoE around your target). His stun is one of the best level 1 stuns in the game, and can be very useful when trying to get a First Blood or initiating ganks. He has another active skill that increases the movement speed and armor of you and nearby allies, which is useful for closing in on enemies or for running away. His ultimate adds a large number of damage to your regular attacks for a period of time, which is extremely useful for pushing down towers or in the middle of team fights. While farm dependent and has a low mana pool like Skeleton King, his natural tankiness and passive cleave skill makes killing jungle creeps easier.

By no means would I say that these are necessarily the best heroes, but picking them up and learning how to play them correctly lets you familiarize yourself with other aspects of the game, and make the transition to more intermediate and advanced heroes easier later along the road.

As a final note, the heroes I listed above are considered EASY TO PLAY but are not necessarily EASY TO MASTER. All have some sort of slow or stun in their skillset, allowing you to stay relatively safe throughout games. These are heroes that allow you to work on fundamentals without worrying too much about things like "what playing a support means", or "how to be good at last hitting" or "what items you should buy". There are optimal ways of playing each of these heroes (which you are unlikely to do when first starting off on DOTA), but these heroes' skills put less of an emphasis on that, and allows you to be immediately useful to your team.

Understanding why this question is somewhat meaningless requires an understanding of how Starcraft 2's network architecture works.

In most online games, you have a server and a number of clients. Every client will send all of its actions to the server, and the server will send the result of all those actions to every client. The server is the authority - the state of the game-world in the server's memory is the way the game-world "actually looks" at that moment. A client's game-world, however, is always out-of-date, because there is some latency (about one half of the ping) between when the server sends out updates and the client receives them. To combat this, the game will attempt to guess the real positions of objects. Keeping the game smooth when it guesses wrong is complicated, and more work must be done to account for latency in the other direction. In short, it's complicated.

However, this is not how Starcraft II's networking works.

The primary problem with the client-server model is that every server-tick (usually about 20 times a second), we need to send out the new position/velocity/health/etc. of every object that's changed. This is fine in a game like Counterstrike, where you might have upwards of 60 players and maybe a few physics-entities to update every tick. However, in an RTS like Starcraft II, where an 8-player game could easily have over 1000 units, this is simply not feasible.

Instead, Starcraft II (and every other mainstream RTS) takes a different approach. The idea is that the game should be completely deterministic, so that running the game with exactly the same inputs should always produce exactly the same results. Then all we need to do is make sure all players run the same inputs at the same time, and they should all see the same results. SCII does this by queuing up every command you give it to be done at some point in the future (typically, around 12 frames ie. 200ms). Everyone sends their commands to everyone else and then, when everyone has everyone's commands, everyone executes them all at once. Now instead of syncing thousands of units, the players only need a sync a handful of commands, a huge improvement. And because there is no need for a central authority, RTS games (including SCII) will usually just have players communicate directly with each other, rather than have a central-server. This sort of networking architecture is called peer-to-peer (P2P).

There are a number of problems with this peer-to-peer architecture:

• Observable "lag". Because commands are queued and not executed immediately, there is an observable lag between when a player clicks the mouse and when the unit responds. This "lag" is not lag in the traditional sense, in that it is not due to the latency between players; rather, it is a fundamental and unavoidable consequence of how SCII's networking architecture works. It is not due to poor coding on Blizzard's part - there is nothing they can do to avoid it without switching to a client-server architecture (which would have its own, more severe issues; see above)

• Every player is as slow as the slowest player. If the 200ms queue-time has passed and one player still hasn't sent out their latest commands, the game will freeze for everyone until everyone receives that player's commands. In SCII, after about one second of not receiving any commands from a player it will display the "waiting for player XXX" dialog. Also, when SCII detects that a player is consistently running behind on sending out their commands, the game will increase the queue-time to give the slower player more leeway. This is what the "XXX is slowing down the game" message means.

  It's also why, when there is a laggy player, your units will take longer to respond to you, and why units will move slower or sometimes freeze altogether, even if your computer is more-than-capable of handling that many units.

  Finally, it's also why I said your question is "somewhat meaningless" - it's not that SCII has "netcode issues," it's just that SCII has no choice but to increase the queue time, to compensate for the player not sending out commands fast enough. This is unavoidable, and every mainstream RTS has this same problem (Note that Counterstrike is client-server; and, due to not having as many units as an RTS, there is a good chance that HoN is client-server as well. Client-server games will not have this issue at all.)

• Desyncs are possible. Under client-server, desyncing (that is, having a different game-state than everyone else) is not a problem, since the game is essentially always desynced, and always trying to compensate for it. However, in a P2P RTS game, since there is no actual authority, a desync is catastrophic - how do we know whose game-state is correct!? SCII is coded well enough that desyncs are exceedingly rare, and it will try its best to recover (eg. if two players agree and one doesn't, you can be pretty sure the two players have the correct state), but sometimes that is simply not possible. In SCII, this results with everyone being kicked from the game with the message "You have been desynced."

• Cheating. In a client-server game, it's possible to give each client only the information it needs. In a P2P game, however, in order to run the entire simulation, every player must know the entire game-state at all times. This is why maphacks are possible in SCII - if the game were client-server, maphacks would be impossible. Also, players can lie about who won/lost a game (see "Stats Tracking" below). These facts are the reason many people are talking about making RTS games client-server in the future, as users' bandwidth goes up. All mainstream RTS's are still P2P, however.

• Scaling. In a P2P game, the total amount of network traffic goes up quadratically with the number of players, unlike a client-server game where network traffic goes up linearly. What this means is, while P2P requires less traffic for a small number of players, it requires much more for a large number of players. You will probably never see a 64-player P2P game.

This list of drawbacks is why client-server is so much more popular. However, for games with a large number of objects (primarily RTS's), these drawbacks are not nearly as bad as trying to sync thousands of units per update.

For more info on P2P games, see the canonical article that essentially made networked RTS's possible, 1500 Archers on a 28.8: Network Programming in Age of Empires and Beyond

[Edit] There has been some confusion about the purpose of Battle.Net - after all, if there is no central server, why do we need Battle.Net? Battle.Net serves a few purposes:

• Matchmaking. The players communicate directly with each other in-game, but they need some way of discovering each other to begin with.
• Stats tracking. Keeping track of wins/losses/achievements/etc. Of course, since the game is not actually running on Blizzard's servers, Blizzard must rely on each player honestly reporting when they win/lose, which could lead to cheating. But this sort of cheat is easy to detect, since two players disagreeing on a win or loss should be rare, and when it happens to the same player over and over...
• Nat Punch-through. This is why you don't need to open any ports in your firewall to play Starcraft II.
• Anti-piracy. There is no technical reason why the game should quit when Battle.Net goes down for repairs; or why you should need an Internet connection to play single-player. They only do this as an (misguided, in my opinion) attempt to combat piracy.

Some people have claimed that, while the game is not actually run on Battle.Net's servers, the commands players send to each other are still routed through Battle.Net. This is possible, but highly unlikely: it would unnecessarily and enormously increase Blizzard's bandwidth costs, and increase the lag (possibly significantly) for all players. The only benefit would be to hide the players' IP-addresses from each other. I'll come back to this post when I learn more.