It's time for another edition of "stating useless things that you knew already!"

Today's post will be about a rough guide to the stages of DotA, inspired by nothing, for no purpose, and well, most of which you should already know.

As useless as classification is, it does make things clearer. I realise that I've been using the word "conventional" to describe strategies in DotA without actually a clear definition of what exactly comprises a "conventional" strategy.

But that's merely a derivative, not the main focus, of today's topic.

In fact I'm pretty bad at giving topic names, so I'll just go on with the discussion without any hint or focus as to what I'm about to discuss.

So anyway, a DotA game can be divided into 3 stages. The early-game, the mid-game, and the late-game. DUH. Actually any game can be divided into any number of stages. One could always make up the one-over-pi-game, the super-duper-late-game, or the pre-pre-pre-game. For my purposes today, the division stated will be more useful though.

Another obvious point here. Early-game comes before mid-game which comes before late-game. However, it would be rather boring and even more vague to explain the "early-game" as simply "the beginning of the game". Rather, it would be better to describe the various stages of the game by what actions and situations players will find themselves in.

To begin with, the "early-game" is a situation where players find themselves mostly in lanes. The main priority of most of the team in the "early-game" will be to gain XP and a bit of gold, thus most hero movement is easily predictable. Almost always, all 3 lanes will be filled, and players can more or less see most of what their opponents are doing, or at least predict it easily within a 10 second window.

Moving on to the "mid-game", a team's main priority here will be to farm their heroes up while preventing the opponents from farming, and also pushing towards an easier late-game, getting closer to victory (i.e. downing towers). The mid-game is more gold and gank oriented, and hero movements around the map will be very rapid. Usually though, as a result of the necessity for a late-game advantage, teams will most often see at least 1 or 2 of their heroes on the map for most of the time. Protection and backstabbing, movement around the map, will be the focus of teams.

In the "late-game", a team's priority is simply to win the game. Much like the mid-game, teams will have 1 or 2 heroes visible on the map at any time. However, since the objective is to drive towards a game win rather than to simply just dumbly continue farming up, movement around is much more predictable. Ideally, even-matched teams will at this stage of the game be focusing on facing each other 5v5. If backdooring is not a factor, then most late-game actions are much more predictable than all that movement in the mid-game. Hero positions will be very predictable, namely that they're all going to be together most of the time, unless they do a split push, in which case the heroes that you can't see are most likely behind the heroes that you can see. The late-game sees many large scale 5v5 engagements. What is unpredictable about the late-game though is that any effective and unpredictable moves by a team can give them a game win, not just a tower kill or a hero kill.

Having defined the 3 stages of the game by the situations and actions of a DotA team, there are also different set of skills prevalent in the 3 different stages of the game. "Skills" here more of being "decision-making processes" given different amounts of information. To be specific, I'm going to talk about decision making by individuals, and anything that involves more than 1 person isn't part of my scope.

It's actually pretty simple, these "skills" are simply how a person makes a decision when presented with certain amounts of information and in certain situations.

The first, which makes a player much better in the early-game phase, is what I call "laning skills". The ability to make decisions when you can see most of what happens around the map. Then there's the whole last-hitting and whatsnot part which I don't have time to cover.

The next, for lack of a better term, is what I call "gameplay skills". Gameplay of course is too generic a term, but... whatever. This involves making decisions when you can't see most or even all of the enemy team. Strangely, the most simple action also is the one decision that is the most difficult to make soundly. This skill is most of the time as simple as "which lane do I go to".

The last is what I term "engagement skills". Knowing what to do when you can see more or less everyone... but this time, when they're all together. In theory it's simple, simply being at the correct place, casting the correct spell at the correct guy at the correct time. The difficulty of this decision making skill is that a player very often has a 0.1 second window to make any decision. What this skill comprises of is usually a mixture of logical planning (to know what one should do when the engagement begins), instinct (to do what one does when the situations aren't too ideal), and desperation (what to do when the shit hits the fan, or if you want something more specific, when your Earthshaker just got hexed before the battle started).

What's the point of all this? To give myself so much more to elaborate on when I next have the time. Hurhur.

For now, I book in.

In the meantime, you can go find out where your weaknesses are at. I know for a fact that my gameplay skills are shit.