What Dota Captain is
Dota Captain (dotacaptain.com) is a free, fan-built Dota 2 Captain's Mode draft simulator. It lets you practise the part of Dota that happens before the horn: rolling for your side, drafting a five-hero lineup against an AI captain through the full pick and ban sequence, setting a strategy, and then watching a match engine resolve the game so you can see how your draft would have played out.
It is built for players who want reps on drafting without queueing for a 40-minute match every time. A full run takes about five minutes, and nothing you do here touches your real Dota 2 account or matchmaking rating. It is a sandbox for learning the draft, not a replacement for the game.
How the draft works
Every run starts with a lottery: a coin flip decides whether you play Radiant or Dire and which side gets first pick. From there you draft through the real 24-step Captain's Mode pick and ban order against an AI opponent that drafts with role, counter, and synergy logic rather than picking at random.
Bans run on a 20-second timer and picks on a 30-second timer, with 130 seconds of reserve time per team that kicks in once the main clock expires, mirroring the pacing of competitive Captain's Mode. After the draft you assign roles to your five heroes and answer a short set of tempo and risk questions that feed the engine.
The match engine
Once the draft and strategy are locked, a seeded, deterministic engine simulates the match event by event: lane outcomes, kills, tower and barracks pushes, Roshan, teamfights, and the economy that ties them together. The same draft and the same seed always produce the same game, which is what makes it useful for comparing one draft decision against another.
The engine is tuned against reference profiles from real professional matches so that kill counts, gold and experience curves, objective timings, and game length stay in a believable range. It is a model, not a prophecy: it estimates how a lineup tends to perform, and the live log lets you read the story of the match or fast-forward to the result.
Captain rating and the leaderboard
Signed-in captains earn a rating from their simulated results and climb a global leaderboard, with match history saved across devices. You can also try a full run as a guest, with progress kept locally in your browser, before deciding whether to create an account.
A private one-versus-one PvP lobby (in beta) lets two signed-in captains share a room code and run the same Captain's Mode flow against each other, with the outcome resolved on the server. Ranked Versus play is still in development.
The data behind it
Dota Captain draws on a hand-maintained dataset describing every hero's role, timing, fight style, and economy profile, along with curated hero matchup and synergy notes that explain why specific picks counter or combine with one another. These notes power the in-app draft guidance and the public guide, counter, synergy, hero, and item pages.
Our published guides are written to be read on their own, whether or not you ever run a simulation: they describe Captain's Mode drafting, common counters and combinations, item choices, and how to read a draft's power spikes.
Who builds it, and our relationship to Valve
Dota Captain is an independent fan project built and maintained by a single developer who plays Dota. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Valve Corporation.
Dota 2, the Captain's Mode format, hero names, and hero artwork are trademarks and copyrights of Valve Corporation. We use them only to describe and simulate drafting, and we display hero imagery served from Valve's own content delivery network. If you are a rights holder with a concern, our Contact page explains how to reach us.