How to combine and level up your units.
Our Dota Auto Chess upgrade guide explains how to combine chess pieces and make them gain a star level.
Combining chess pieces in Auto Chess is akin to levelling up your player profile, which is to say it’s absolutely crucial if you want to achieve any kind of long-term success in your current game.
Purchase any unit in the game and it’ll have a one star rating. Of course, each piece will have its own strengths, so some one star pieces will be stronger than others, but their overall star ratings remain the same.
What’s not explained is that you have the ability to upgrade these units into even stronger versions with higher star ratings. The difference between a three star unit and one star is monumental, but it’s knowing how to create these units which can be confusing.
In this article, we’ll explain how you combine and upgrade chess pieces in Auto Chess so you can start working towards more powerful team compositions.
Essential Auto Chess Coverage
- Auto Chess Guide – How to get started with the game mode
- Auto Chess Tier List – A work in progress evaluation of the strongest units
- Auto Chess Starting Strategies – Tried and tested opening gambits
- Auto Chess Upgrades – Upgrading and combining chess pieces over time
- Auto Chess Levelling – How levelling and XP works in Dota Auto Chess
- Auto Chess Free Candy – How to earn Candy and what you can spend it on
- Auto Chess Gold – How to make more gold and spend it efficiently
- Auto Chess Item List – All the in-game items, with stats and combinations
- Auto Chess Ranks – How the ranking system works in Dota Auto Chess
- Auto Chess Download / Install – Setting up for Auto Chess
How to combine and upgrade chess pieces in Dota Auto Chess
Purchase a chess piece and it’ll have a one star rating. You can combine them to level up their star rating and in turn, make them more powerful. The highest star rating achievable in Auto Chess is three, which means it’s not possible to upgrade a three star unit any further.
As a general rule of thumb, three of exactly the same chess piece can be combined to create an upgraded, two star version of the original piece. To do this, you simply need to place these pieces on the board near each other and they will automatically combine.
To create a three star piece, it’s largely the same process. You need to get three two star pieces on the board and they will automatically upgrade into one three star piece.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how it works:
- 3 x 1 Star = One 2 Star piece.
- 3 x 2 Star = One 3 Star piece.
Nice and simple, but note that there are exceptions to this upgrading process.
To make things a little more complicated, things are slightly different for Druids.
If you want to combine Druids, you’ll still need to have three of them on the board, but two of them must be of the same type, and one of them must be different to the others. For example, two Treant Protectors and one Enchantress. This would mean your Treant Protectors would combine and upgrade to a two star unit.
For a three star Druid unit, you can combine two 2 Star pieces to create one 3 Star unit. This accelerated levelling is unique to the Druid class, but it also requires some setup. You need to have four different druids on the board in order to do this (Lone Druid, Treant Protector, Furion and Enchantress).
So if you’ve got two 2 Star Treants on the board, they would combine to a 3 Star Treant if you had a Lone Druid, Furion and Enchantress on the board alongside them.
To see the Druid combination in action, skip to 18:17 in the video we’ve embedded below.
Here’s a breakdown of what happens:
- Trump has two 2 Star Enchantresses, one 2 Star Treant and two 2 Star Furions.
- He goes on to purchase a Lone Druid. This means he now has four different types of Druid in his locker.
- He goes ahead and places all four on the board, activating the Druid combo perk.
- As he has two Furions, they combine to form a 3 Star Furion. He runs out of time, but had he placed the Enchantresses slightly closer together, they would have combined to form a 3 Star Enchantress too.
