DOTA Strategy
Lane control means you’re staying in your lane, getting maximum experience and gold and denying your opponents the same experience and gold. There are several techniques to this. Here I provide basic explanations and guidelines to Lane Control in basic overview.
Tip #1 Harassing
Harassing is a tactic to attack and try damaging your opponent hero to force him to stay away and play safely is the simplest way of controlling the lane. But there are many advanced points to it because you cannot attack your opponent hero direct to him in certain range. DotA is programmed so that every time you attack an enemy hero every enemy creep within about 400-500 range will attack you, so you might end up receiving more damage that you dealt.
It’s is some advantage if you are raged heroes versus melee, you can attack the enemy if you are far enough from the creeps. But with melee heroes it is much harder to harass ranged heroes. One way to do this is to wait until the creeps almost all died and go ahead, taking advantage of having superior damage (usually). One of much simpler and more effective way to harass is to use spells. The creeps will not attack you if you use spells, so it is pretty much safe. But this takes up mana and often cannot be used too much. Also the creeps will not target you if you use arrow-enhancing abilities like searing arrows/frost arrows/etc. So it gives the corresponding heroes a much easier way to harass.
Tip #2 Last Hitting and Denying
To last hit means to try to deal the finishing blow to the enemy creep and gain gold for the kill, it gives you around 40-50 gold. But it is pretty hard to do with all your creeps pounding on them as well.
Denying means killing your creeps to deny the enemy experience and gold. You can attack allied creeps if they are below half health. A normal creep kill gives around 60 experience, while a denied creep gives them only 24 exp to ranged heroes and 48 to melee (but I’m not sure about the numbers). This also requires good timing.
Tip #3 Creep Blocking
To pull the creep’s meeting point to your side or behind your tower, you can consider creep blocking, that is, impeding the creep’s movement by means of walking in front of them and stopping from time to time, sometimes walking from side to side, so that the creeps huddle behind you and are slowed down. You can practice this in single-player mode with decreased speed, gradually increasing it back to normal.
Tip #4 Creep Pulling
This is a really advanced technique, it allows you to delay your creeps significantly, but it is useless in solo lanes as it takes a lot of time during which your opponents have free farming. To perform creep pulling you need to find a neutral creep camp near the lane and at a certain time attack them and retreat into the lane. The neutrals will follow you, and if you timed it correctly your creeps will engage the neutrals and be pulled into the forest, getting significantly delayed and maybe killed. It also allows you to destroy a creep camp which is usually a decent bonus. Also while your creeps are fighting the neutrals you can drag another neutral camp into the fight. But doing this requires perfect timing.