• How to play

    If you’ve played a “MOBA” before, the game layout is similar – it’s not the same. If you’ve played a prior orcs must die game, the layout is extremely similar – it’s just been adapted to be a PvP. If you haven’t played either, that’s ok. We love new people here, and the game isn’t too hard to learn.

    The game starts with each team spawning on opposite sides. There is a short countdown, at which point the game starts. You have about 45 seconds from game start until minions spawn. Minions will spawn from your open warcamps and are based on the cards you play in them. They run up one or two lanes (depending if you have one or two camps open), and the enemy’s minions will run down the other two lanes (once again, dependent on if they opened both or only one warcamp yet). Minions are the lifeblood of your attack, without them you can’t win. There are gates and guardians on defense for each team, your goal is to get minions past these gates and guardians and into the enemy rift.

    1.) This is the health bar of the gate. Whatever I move my cursor over, a health bar should appear. On team gates the health bar is currently rather hard to see.

    2.) This is your guardian. They recently got buffed, they are extremely terrifying. If you are on offense, you should be careful about aggro’ing this guy. On defense, he is your best friend. He applies a buff that gives mana and health (alot when out of combat, less when in combat but still very noticable). He also does a very large amount of damage very accurately, use him to your advantage.

    3.) This is your gate. It’s essentially a wall that you control that the enemy can destroy. I stated above that it had a health bar – that health bar does not regenerate. Any damage an enemy does to that gate stays, when it runs out of health it is destroyed.

    4.) This is your gate lever. There is also one on the other side of the gate. Anyone on your team can activate levers for your gates, which will put your gate up or down, depending which it is now (lowers it if it’s raised, raises it if it’s lowered). You can not use enemy levers – you need to kill their gates.

    Those are the guardians and gates you’ll encounter. The unique thing about OMDU is what makes it really an OMD game: traps (and orcs I suppose, but hey. we’ll say traps.) You can lay traps in any area outlined in blue. If you look on the map above, The snaking hallways outlined in blue are areas that my team can lay traps. The snaking area outlined in red is where the enemy team can lay traps.

    Playing Offense: Offense players should be pushing minions to try to get them through to the rift. Early game, that means pushing minions and trying to kill guardians and gates. That will make it easier to get minions through to the rift later. Endgame, it means getting minions the whole way through. Certain heroes are better than others at offense, specifically those with trap disables. Being able to disable traps puts your team at a very large advantage for pushing minions. If you kill a guardian you will open up a glyph slot and also give your entire team currency, so this is a big goal for you.

    Playing Defense: Defense is alot like OMD1 or OMD2. You are going to run over, and wait for the minions to come to you. Your goal is to kill all the minions, cut them down before they damage your guardians or gates. You can lay traps (and so can all your teammates), which will help you kill minions. You can also outright attack them for damage. The tricky part about Defense is dealing with minions while dealing with the enemy offense. Killing minions isn’t too hard, but killing minions with two enemies beside them is much harder.
    Class Breakdown: Offense and Defense cover your roles, but really heroes fall into four categories at the moment.

    • Defensive: Good at dealing with minions
    • Offensive: Very good at making sure minions can attack
    • Assassin: Good at killing enemies. Normally on offense, due to killing defenders helps minions greatly.
    • Support: These can go defense or offense, but usually are best utilized jumping between the two. Anything that is drastically improved by running with a teammate or group of minions falls into this category. Currently, it is mainly hogarth and ivy.

    There are many developed strategies for what to place where and what to upgrade first, and not all of us agree on them all. Given the current alpha state, they are also constantly changing. No pressure when you play in game – we love new players and we’re happy to help explain strategies.