Unit Positioning Guide

Straight Line Formation (Early Game)

If you have plenty of melee units, put them as close to the enemy as possible (so that they will engage fast).

Having melee units on the second/third role doesn’t make sense because they would take more time to engage and would have a lower impact. Because of this, a single row (a straight line, centered and evenly spread-out) is the usual choice.

This strategy is also useful for Assassins, but instead of putting them on the first, you need to put them on the last row – this way they would jump right away to the enemy backlines:

Tight Corner Formation (Early - Mid Game)

If you have ranged damage dealers (Longshot, Blaster, Siegebreaker, etc.) that you want to protect, do the opposite. You want to draw the enemy army to you, so put your units as far away from danger as possible.

Imagine your army as an Onion. Tanky units go in the outer layer, damage dealers go on the inside so that they are the last units focused. Putting squishy damage dealers on the backline but on the outside layer is a mistake because it could get them killed by an assassin.

Put your tankiest unit on the outer corner closest to your opponent.

Avoiding AoE (Mid - Late Game)

In the mid-late game it’s not just important to think about tanks and damage dealers, but also about units using their AoE spells efficiently.

It’s not great if your whole army gets hit by a Sunfire ultimate. The “Tight Corner Formation” is exceptionally vulnerable to this, so you should start thinking about splitting your army up a bit. There are different viable ways to do this.

Keep your main army in one corner, but separate one or two units that can tank for a while so that they draw the attention of enemy units. If you are lucky, the separated units will also eat a spell or two.

The key point here is that you want your unit to get the spell off as fast as possible, but you need to avoid getting it killed before it gets the spell off.

This means that you should consider how tanky the unit is. Generally speaking, very tanky units (two or three-star units with some tankiness items) can easily go in front of everybody else. It would be very hard for the enemy to kill them before they do their job.

LVL1 units, however, are a different matter. You have two options:

Keep them on the 2nd row, but close enough to your tanks so that they would take at least some ranged and AoE damage. Keep them on the 1st row, but shoulder to shoulder with other tanks. This way they will take some of the focus fire, but not all of it. This is the better, but a bit more risky option.

Counter positioning (Every phase of the Game)

Counter-positioning means looking at your opponent’s board and moving around your pieces to improve your chances of victory. See where your opponent has positioned them and put your main damage dealers as far away as possible.

Leaving a few units as “bait” close to the enemy AoE is the best practice. Getting 1/3 of your army hit by a powerful AoE instead of your whole army is game-changing.

This applies the other way around as well – see where your opponent is keeping his main army and make sure your important AoE heroes are close to it on the opposite side of the map.

Do you have any more ways positioning your chess? Leave a comment to tell us about it and have fun playing the game!