Awesomenauts Team Play Guide [CONTEST]

Overview

This guide is for new and experienced players of awesomenauts. This guide will talk about teamwork and ways you can help you and your team win matches!

Introduction

Awesomenauts takes its own shot at the MOBA genre but one thing doesn’t vary that much from all the other MOBAs. Awesomenauts is a team game. Without your teamplay you WILL NOT win. This is especially true in awesomenauts because instead of a 5 v 5 or 6 v 6, Awesomenauts only has 3 per team. This means you carry 33% of your teams weight on your back. No matter what it may seem, you are important in every round of ‘Nauts. In this guide I will not be explaining basics or advanced details of the game but instead I will be focusing in on the team aspect and a little bit of team composition.

Part One-Your Role

In a game like Awesomenauts you have to realize that your role will not be the same as everyone else on the team. One player may be tasked with the role of pusher and another may be the healer/support. Whatever the case it is important that you at least have some sort of idea of what your role is. A general tip for guessing the role of a character before you hop into a match is to look on the character select screen or in the armory and view their assigned role under their name. In this screenshot you can see Voltar is assigned Support. These are just general roles however and shouldn’t be all you think about.

When starting your first game of Awesomenauts it may seem like you are meant to be doing everything but in reality this is not the case. Obviously you should kill droids when you see them and don’t allow enemy waves to pile up but sometimes there are bigger priorites. Lets say you are playing Genji and are faced with the situation of either killing droids that are on your turret or using your Monarch Blessing to shield an ally from a clunk explosion to protect him from death. If you decided to kill the droids without worrying about your friend that is currently engaged with Clunk you may have just costed your team a turret anyways. If you would have ignored the droids doing a slight amount of damage on your turret and instead shielded your teammate you would have had 3 people still on the field, preventing any big plays to make a massive push. However in allowing one of your teammates to die (especially if it is a character with great lane clear like lonestar) you no longer have the resources to end the enemies push. This leads to a bad trade overall. Knowing this now you can make better decisions in your games. If you are playing IX you shouldn’t be focused on pushing towers by yourself, you should be focused on sticking in a safe position around your team looking at openings in the enemies formation and trying to capitalize by swapping and working with your team for a kill. This turns the tide into a 3 v 2 and in that situation you can cause the enemy some harm. These few examples were just supports.

Lonestar is an example of a Pusher naut. His abilities work very well together to prevent as much damage on your turret as possible whilst allowing you to push the other team effectively. His dynamite clears droid waves quickly and helps gather solar and experience for your team quite effectively. Lonestar also has his bull which can be used to push droids or nauts back (however you should not always bull droids as there is typically better uses for this cooldown and that can lead to droid wave stacking which can cause a big danger for your team.) Instead of using your bull for droids you can use it as a sort of psuedo-shield against a turret to protect you while you poke at the enemies turret. This is a strong example of a push style naut. Although not specifically classified as a pusher, a psuedo-push naut you can play is Coco. Her Ball Lightning can do significant damage to droids and push them back to prevent pushes. Her auto attack (or left click) also drains droid health at a decent rate and does good damage to turrets.

Coco’s main role however is to harrass the enemy. Many nauts in Awesomenauts are given the role of harasser. It is a role that involves dealing poke damage to high burst damage to either send the enemy behind turrets or into situations that put them into near death. Another harasser is Max Focus. He has his light show ability that deals high amounts of poke damage at low risk. This chip damage adds up and will score your team some kills eventually.

Other roles in awesomenauts are Assassin,Fighter, and Tank. Fighter nauts typically are the nauts who deal the heavy damage and secure the kills in team fights. Examples of this are Skolldir and Jimmy/Amy. These nauts will be your go-to fighters in the situation of a fight. The assassin nauts such as Leon and Vinnie are good at picking off low health targets or bad positioned targets. These nauts typically synergize well with a harasser naut due to harassers lowering enemy health often. The final role of these 3 is the Tank role. This role should be self explanatory if you have played any other game but incase you don’t know the tanks are the high health characters who soak up damage. Clunk is the most well known tank in the game since he is the first one implemented but another tank is Sentry. Tanks are meant to soak damage and if need be will take turret damage to protect a teammate or help secure a kill. They often are strong at bodyblocking enemies due to their large hitboxes and high weight. Tanks are basically told they need to soak up hits due to Sentry being in the game. Sentry has an ability where he puts a shield around him and the more damage it absorbs the more his blackhole ability does. He basically trades the damage enemies did to him right back at them in the form of his blackhole sun. These are very general definitions and ideas to every role but there are plenty more in depth details. Just remember that you are part of a 3-man team, so knowing your role and being able to do it successfully is highly important.

Part Two-Filling Out The Team

Since Awesomenauts is a team game, team composition is important. You don’t want too many low health characters on your team since they will be bursted down easily. You also don’t want too many slow characters since you will likely not see many kills on your side due to lack of follow up. You want a balance of push,damage, and speed. Some nauts such as Vinnie and Spike have low health with mediocre to above average speed but high damage. This naut also has an ability that allows him to use his cloud to speed him up to help him secure kills. Nauts like this do well with a Clunk or Sentry on their team because the health balances out and those two nauts are able to help deal high aoe damage. This allows Vinnie to secure kills on nauts who are escaping the sentry or clunk. In certain scenarios as well, Sentry can trap these nauts and vinnie can deal the last damage needed to kill the enemies. In general you will want a fast high damage naut, a high health naut, and a pusher or support naut. If you have too much of one thing and not enough of another you will have a hard time winning rounds. Another thing you need to keep in mind when choosing your naut at the start of a round is that players will not always have all the characters you have unlocked. This means that a high amount of selected nauts will be the Free Week Nauts. You can tell a free naut of the week by a yellow exclamation mark (!) by their name in the armory.

This means you need to examine the nauts that are in the free rotation and pick a character that fairs well with most of them. This is especially true if you are the first player choosing their naut. Another tip you can follow is to use the team chat before locking your naut in. This allows you to ask who the others in your team are good at and you can ask WHO they have unlocked. This will raise your chances of success. This is off-topic, but one thing you should keep in mind when spending your awesomepoints is to choose nauts that are not on free rotation that week to make sure you have a wide selection of characters to choose from to make sure you can fill out any role necessary on your team. (Don’t buy a character before testing it out in the armory. This prevents you from wasting your hard earned points and will make the decision easier.)
Filling out a role in the team that is not currently filled out will make your team much more well-rounded and will help you win more matches or at least have more fun whilst playing said matches.

Part Three-General Team Play

First things first, don’t be a jerk. We have all had a time in our lives where we know we messed up or we know we could have done better. It is better to encourage your teammates than it is to bring them down. If you lack morale or effort you will likely lose and that is never fun. Instead of flaming your froggy who seems to keep missing those dashes, give him some pointers or just say its ok when he says my bad. This is just simple stuff but it could go a lot further. I will leave it at that however and move on to the next part.

Oh minimap how I love you. The minimap is one of, if not the most handy tool you have at your disposal. It can even show how low turrets are now. With the minimap you can guide your team or find a badly positioned enemy. The minimap should be looked at often so you can see if teammates are in a bad spot or need help. With this you can find success in most matches.

If you can, give callouts. Use the 1-4 voice chat buttons to help you if you cant type (hopefully not too much of the 1-taunting…). Remember 2 is help,3 is defend and 4 is attack. If you can however, type in chat instead of just voice commands. Something as simple as calling out an Invis clunk on Aiguillion. These will help your teammates and might save them a life or two. Also make sure to let your team know when you are going back for upgrades or health. I like using 3 as a “Defend/Going back to base” button instead of just defending. Saves time and will let your teammates know instantly.

Buy upgrades that work with your team. If you are playing voltar and you see your ted or gnaw being picked on buy healbot knockback to save them. This will allow them to retreat and will help you get heals as well. Working around/with your team can often times feel more satisfying when you win and will help gain you reputation. If you got a good rep you will find that this community actually has a lot of nice people.

Here is one quick tip as well.
Make sure you have Show Player Status Dock enabled (checkmark in the box). There isn’t really a reason to have this feature disabled since it covers a very slight amount of the screen (and that part of the screen isn’t typically very busy) and will give you valuable info without hitting Tab.

Incase you were curious to how it looked in game here is me shooting at it. (In this pic there is only my picture since I made no bots in the game to take screenshots)

This setting will show when players are respawning,in droppods,and will show how low their health is. Keep in mind that enemy healthbars will not be shown in here since that would be cheating. This should help you guys a lot!

Wrap-Up

Awesomenauts is a team game. Using teamwork you will succeed. I can’t wait for the 24th for F2P because that means the playerbase will increase and I can meet more *awesome* people. This game has been great for so long, so lets stick together as players and make it even better for these coming years. Thanks for reading.

SIDE NOTE- If you would like a free raelynn you new players, you can have her free if you use this code 7WDN-5KZY-S8DL. You go to the left of the play button and find Enter Recruitment Code.
From there you just enter it and you will recieve a free Raelynn!

If you feel like you have learned anything at all from this guide please rate it. I am not asking for thumbs up, just rate it what you feel it deserved. Thank you for reading once more, and I hope to see you playing awesomenauts!

PS: If you need a team to que with in nauts, join my discord! [link] This link only works for the first ten who join so be quick! I am trying to add small groups of people at a time to grow the numbers slowly but safely. You earn XP for being active and unlock stuff as you level up in the server! Also I give Creeper Clunks to people who are in the server! This server also supports Dota 2 teams, TF2, Castle Crashers, Overwatch, and even Minecraft (even though I don’t play it very much). If you decide to join, welcome! Thanks again for reading!