Teamfight Tactics: Baby's First Autobattler

Welcome to Teamfight Tactics. An autobattler of the League of Legends variety.

An autobattler mixes mechanics of deckbuilding and chess which you play against 7 other players at the same time. That may sound a little daunting but we’re going to break it down here and make it a little more digestible.

Breakdown

Let’s start with the first thing you’ll be faced with when loading into a game; ‘The Carousel’.

The carousel is a round where champions are spinning around in a circle, like that of a carousel and players take turns choosing a champion to take back to their board. These champions all equipped with a randomly selected item as well. 

The first carousel round is different to all the rest as all 8 players select at the same time. Each time after that, the selection is based on whose losing the most gets first rotation, in pairs. 

After you’ve selected a champion you’ll be taken back to your board, and get ready for the ‘Minion Rounds’.

Rounds

There are several round types other than player versus player rounds, for the sake of ease I’ve titled them ‘Minion’ or ‘Mob’ rounds. These rounds will include fighting minions, chickens, wolves and drakes. The different mobs have different effectivenesses and different ways you’ll want to approach them, but for now all you need to know is killing a minion/mob has a chance to drop an item. This is where the randomly generated numbers or as it’s commonly known RNG comes into play.  

If you’re lucky enough to be granted items, you’ll be able to attach them to your champion/s and give them so stat boosts, but items in TFT aren’t as familiar as they may appear.

Items

Many of the items you see are recognisable from your favourite old stomping ground; Summoner’s Rift. However they don’t all act the same way you may expect. Currently the game features 39 items, 8 of which are components that will be the majority of the drops from your ‘minions’, leaving the other 31 to be combined items. Combined items are exactly as you’d expect, items that are made from two other items combined together. Rather than diving in and explaining all the items, what they do, so on and so forth, we’re trying to keep it brief, so I’ve attached a little item cheat sheet below; courtesy of @Scarra on Twitter.

Image courtesy of Scarra as posted on Twitter

Champions

You’ll see plenty of recognisable faces. As of the time of writing this, TFT features 50 champions from the league and are looking to add at least 10 more. These champions all fall under different classes and ‘origins’. Each champion has a class, such as Assassin or Gunslinger, and also has their own origin such as Pirate, Yordle or Glacial.

These are where you get your synergy bonuses. If you have multiple champions on your board of the same class and origin, you’ll be given bonuses such as having 2 Dragons on the board making all Dragon units immune to magic damage.

Not only do champions come with classes but they also come in levels and tiers. Some champions such as Vayne, Garen and Darius are Tier 1 units, meaning they cost 1 gold from the store. Champions like Pyke and Varus are Tier 2 units, they’ll be slightly more effective against Tier 1 units, though they don’t definitively beat them every time, and of course Tier 2 units cost 2 gold. This goes all the way up to Tier 5. 

The chance of higher Tier units showing up gradually increases as you level up, we’ll touch on that in just a little bit. 

Lastly, an important note is leveling your champions up. When you have 3 of any one unit, they combine to level up said unit, so buying 3 Garens makes 1 Level 2 Garen unit. Leveling units are important as their base stats increase, most importantly their health. This is what helps bring the tiers of champions closer together as you get more wilder match-ups between Level 3 Tier 1 units and Level 2 Tier 4 units.

Now just like items there’s far too many champions to individually cover them all. Fortunately Scarra has another cheat sheet to help out.

Image courtesy of Scarra as posted on Twitter

YOUR BOARD

Your board is where you’ll be making all your decisions. This is where you buy your units from the shop, move your units around the board, equip your items (though you can equip items mid battle), and manage your economy.

Unit positioning is something that’s best left to once you understand the game so I’m going to leave it off here but there’ll be plenty of useful guides you can find elsewhere, and I’ll likely make some more TFT guides of my own.

One of the most important aspects of TFT is managing your economy. After each round, you’ll received an amount of gold. This amount differs on several factors. The standard amount is 5 gold once you get past the first set of minion rounds. From there factors such as winning (which gives you 1 extra gold) being on a winning or losing streak (which can give up to 3 extra gold) and having interest (which can give up to 5 extra gold) come into play.

Having interest is the most important of the three. To the left of your board, you’ll have these 5 open spaces.

When you have 10 gold saved up, you’ll receive 1 interest, giving you 1 extra gold at the end of a turn. This interest total goes up in multiples of 10 (so 20, 30, 40 and 50), giving 1 to 5 gold as you may expect. This does mean having 50 unspent gold to receive 5 extra gold at the end of a turn, which seems a little silly but the mechanic is the most important thing for being good at the game. 

But why would you save 50 gold? Well there’s other things you can be spending gold on other than units. Each round your shop will change. However, you can spend 2 gold to reroll the shop and try to get different units. There’s no limit on rerolling either, so it can be quite the money sink.

You can also spend 4 gold to gain 4 xp. This XP contributes to your level which increase the total amount of units you can have on the board at one time, as well as increasing the drop chances of higher tier units too. At the end of each turn, you’ll receive 2 XP whether you win or lose but as you level up the XP amount needed gets much higher so you’ll find yourself stuck around the mid levels if you don’t invest in some XP.

Fighting

So lastly is understanding fighting, and this one is pretty simple, your champions will auto attack each other, acting very similarly to how they would in a regular League of Legends game. Each attack gives them a little bit of a mana, and taking damage also gives units a little bit of a mana. Once they reach maximum mana, they’ll use their ability, which you can check by hovering over the champion.

Each ability does ‘Spell Damage’, regardless of whether the champion is typically AD or AP, and some abilities don’t do any damage at all, instead offering CC. These abilities will be fairly recognisable too, like Varus’s Q, Pyke’s E, Sejuani’s Ultimate. Each coming with different strengths in and against different compositions, and that’s where the depth really comes into the game. 

Wrap Up

Teamfight Tactics is quite a deep game. Between understanding items, champions, compositions, positioning, economy management, there's quite a lot to take in but it’s quite a fun game even to a casual audience thanks to the RNG elements and overall presentation of watching your favourite champions duke it out.

Basically if solo queue is tiring you out, or maybe you’re really into deckbuilding card games or just need something to do that’s a little less engaging than being locked into a 40 minute typing session with a feeding bot laner, give TFT a try!

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