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Pushing is the art of knocking down key enemy buildings, such as Towers and Barracks, but also ties in to map control and the ability to farm creeps quickly.
All heroes are capable of pushing to some degree (even if it's just their right click attack), but there are a variety of abilities that allow you to push harder and faster in the early game.
Destroying enemy towers early on can give your team a big advantage in terms of gold, and can also make it more difficult to the other team to farm safely. Many pro teams often use full on push strats where they aim to end the game within 15-20 minutes.
Pushers are usually at their most potent in the early-mid game, so it's important to make use of their abilities while you can. As the game progresses, towers and creeps become massively less powerful compared to heroes.
Pushers all have some kind of ability that allows them to destroy towers relatively quickly or early in the game, generally these fall in to 5 categories:
- A skill that directly damages or attacks buildings (e.g. 
Nether Blast, 
Diabolic Edict or 
Mass Serpent Ward)
- Minions that add bulk and damage to the lane (e.g. 
Nature's Call, Demonic Conversion or 
Holy Persuasion)
- Skills that allow you to attack or weaken a number of enemy creeps at once (e.g. 
Dragon Slave, 
Ether Shock, 
Ion Shell or 
Illuminate)
- Skills that heal or otherwise strengthen your creeps (e.g. 
Shadow Wave or 
Nature's Attendants)
- Skills that slow down tower attack speeds (e.g. 
Liquid Fire)
A lot of the skills from pushing also double up for defending towers. For example, being able to nuke a creep wave or use minions to absorb the brunt of the attack. Skills like 
Plague Ward are also more useful defensively as you have time to build a good number.
Generally anti-push is most useful during the early part of the game, when an enemy trilane/jungler may be pushing very hard against a solo lane. If you have good early game skills that allow you to (safely) push back, you can make a big difference to your team.
Destroying a tower earns 1000+ gold for your team. During the early part of the game this makes a massive difference to your team's overall wealth, especially your support heroes who don't have a source of farm.
Ultimately, you do want to push all enemy towers and destroy their ancient, but the gold gained from destroying towers is relatively more useful at the start than the end of the game:
- If you have 20 last hits and have earned 800 gold, 2 destroyed towers is worth another 400 gold = 50% increased gold.
- If you have 100 last hits and have earned 4000, 2 destroyed towers worth another 400 gold = 10% increased gold.
Pushing also denies the opposition space to farm in - they often have to forgo the safety of a nearby tower if they want to farm.
Each player on the team receives approximately 200 gold for each tower destroyed, or 100 gold if the tower is denied. (The amount can vary somewhat if a particular hero last hits the tower - see http://www.dota2wiki.com/wiki/Buildings)
As you can see, quickly pushing down an enemy team's towers can provide you with a hefty gold advantage that could prove conclusive, if used properly. Pushing down enemy towers has the added effect of moving the lanes away from your own towers, making them harder to destroy.
There can be disadvantages to early pushing:
- You are pushing the lane towards the enemy side of the map, making it easier for them to farm safely
- Your team are more exposed to ganks
- Towers being destroyed tends to end the laning part of the game, meaning more movement of heroes and team fights
- Lacklustre pushing or good defence can lead to denied towers and only half the gold
As you can see, it's your team's carries that could be most negatively effected by all this. Most carries want a nice, safe, orderly lane that's close to their tower where they can farm and level up. Pushers are naturally disruptive to their lane and want to be attacking the enemy tower as soon as possible.
The other major issue with pushing is that you have to advance your lane towards their tower, making you an ideal target for enemy gankers. Generally, the rock/paper/scissors of DOTA strategy is:
Push Beats Turtle
Gank Beats Push
Turtle Beats Gank
(Turtling is a defensive strategy where you try to avoid early conflict and farm hard). A good example of this is a hero like 
Nature's Prophet - he's very valuable in high level play not only because of his abilities, but because he can fit into any of these three strategies:
1) 
Hand of Midas jungle prophet can successfully turtle
2) Nature's Call pushing prophet can take towers early
3) 
Sprout and 
Teleportation prophet can be a terrific ganker
Map control gets mentioned a lot, but is rarely defined. For me, it has two key components.
1) The positions on the map where the three lanes's creeps meet
2) The ganking ability, team fight and vision of each team
The first point is the most critical, and also the most open to interpretation. If your bottom lane has pushed a long way into the enemy side of the map - is that a good thing or the bad thing? The answer depends very much on what you want to do with it:
- If you want to farm a lane, you ideally want it on your side of the map, somewhere close to a tower so that you're difficult to gank.
- If you want to defend your buildings, or attack enemy ones, then you want the lane pushed onto their side of the map. Until the very late game, backdoor protection stops buildings being destroyed by heroes without their creeps being present.
Vision and ganking also matter. Teams ideally need to split up to farm and level up efficiently, but they can only do this if they feel reasonably safe - lack of vision, dangerous gankers, a well co-ordinated opposition and risky farming spots will slow them down dramatically.
I've had games where I was afraid to go and ward up or farm the jungle because the enemy team had such strong map control - psychology does matter in DOTA!
As you can see, map control does also tie into map awareness somewhat - being able to read the state of the game, what each team is trying to do, etc.
Manipulating lane position is not that different from stacking/pulling/denying or auto-attacking like you would at the start of the game as a support. If you attack your own creeps, deny them or use neutrals to draw them away you can usually draw it closer to your own tower. If you keep attacking enemy creeps outside last hitting, or use pushing abilities, then you'll quickly start giving it momentum.
Generally you can only be effecting one lane at a time (unless you're Nature's Prophet, 
Io or have 
Boots of Travel), and overall map control is more of a team thing. The most important issue here is to be co-ordinated, and have a plan.
For example:
You're playing 
Shadow Shaman and want to be taking down towers as soon as your ultimate is available, you need to consider the needs of your team. If it's full of gankers, pushers and other heroes with good mid-game potential, then go for it.
If you're laning with 
Anti-Mage or 
Faceless Void they're probably not going to thank you for pushing the lane out and destroying the enemy tower too early. Instead, baby-sit for a while, then head to another lane and push that tower instead.
Unfortunately a lot of pub teams don't even consider map control, it's just one of those things that happens. We've all been on those teams where everyone is in their own jungle fighting over scraps while the opposition safely turtles up their hard carries.
Equally, we've all been on teams where some players insist on pushing the lanes hard into the enemy base without the ability to win a team fight and take rax. This just feeds the opposition and starves your team of opportunities.
Obviously strategy is always situational in DOTA, but here are some common scenarios we can look at:
Your team is full of pushers, gankers and semi-carries
Maybe you've got a 
Chen or 
Enchantress on your team, maybe you're lacking proper carries or team fight for later on. Either way, you want an aggressive, disruptive style that stops the opposition from playing a long game and feeding up their carries.
You should be aggressively pushing towers as soon as your heroes have the potential to take them down. Keep pushing hard and don't let up. Your accumulated gold/xp advantage will hopefully be enough to let you take rax, and end the game soon. If not take a look below...
You've out pushed the opposition, but you're struggling to take rax
Maybe you're lacking in carry or team fight compared to the opposition, despite the pushing advantage you've accrued. Don't think you can win the vital fight to take rax? Relax. A lot of players are so intent on sticking with their strategy of winning quickly (and up to this point, this mindset has probably been vital), they can't see what else to do.
If you've got great map control, all 3 lanes are well onto their side of the map...you just need to work an opening - DON'T FEED THEM CREEPS! Yes, STOP PUSHING. Continuing to push the lanes hard is just letting them gain gold and xp from the safety of their base - this is exactly what the opposition wants.
Sure, keep the lanes on their side of the map, but no further forward than the position their T2 towers were in. Ward aggressively near their base. Farm their jungle and ancients. You've now effectively cut off their supplies. They can't farm for gold or xp without leaving the safety of their base. In the meantime, your team can continue to strengthen, maybe take Roshan.
Even if their team has massively superior carry to yours, they will still lose if you're gaining a massive farm/xp advantage. Sooner or later they're going to have to leave the base, risking a team fight or being picked off in ganks, or be massively outfarmed.
You've just won a team fight...what do you do?
Generally speaking you should push hard everytime you win a team fight, or have successfully ganked a powerful enemy hero. If you have the opportunity to take a tower or force a fight that you'll win, then do it.
This is especially true when you're on the back foot, you need to take advantage of this breathing space to get the lanes away from your base and/or claw back some of the opposition's lead.
If there's no chance you can really achieve anything by pushing in this gap, consider taking Roshan instead if you can do it before the opposition can respawn.
Taking Rax vs Taking A Tower
Dumb question, right? Given the choice, you'd always take Rax. However, it's sometimes a question of risk vs reward. Maybe you've knocked out 2 members of the enemy team...they're going to respawn in about 30 seconds. One of your lanes is close to their rax, one close to a T2 tower.
Obviously the right decision will depend on the situation (how likely are you to win that fight at rax?) - but don't be afraid sometimes to take the less risky option and just continue to build a lead.
Pushing with a hard carry on the team
We've already talked a bit about not too pushing a hard carry's lane too early, and how you want to farm close to your base. So how do pushers and hard carries fit together on the same team?
The two can actually work quite nicely together - provided you leave at least one lane "safe" for the hard carry to farm, pushing the other ones aggressively can actually be very helpful. Not only do they benefit from the extra gold, the opposition will be too busy dealing with the aggressive pushing to get after the hard carry early on.
The risk here is that you start running into 4v5 team fights at towers, with your hard carry not yet ready to join in. If this happens, it's usually best just to play more passively and wait for your hard carry to be fed.
It's difficult to do this deliberately without a seriously well co-ordinated team, but you can definitely use lane control to effect engagements with the enemy:
Example 1: The two teams are squaring up for a team fight near a tower
If one team has their creeps in another lane actively attacking the enemy tower there, it gives them a definite advantage. They can afford to set up defensively and force the opposition to either attack them, retreat, teleport one of their heroes away, or wait and risk losing their other tower.
Example 2: The two teams are squaring up for a team fight in their base
The advantage here is even more pronounced - having 2-3 lanes all pushing into an enemy base at once causes real problems. The defending team absolutely do not want to split their strength at this point...but their other towers/rax are being damaged...and they don't usually want to initiate and lose their defensive advantage. It's a horrible situation.
Example 3: Trying to take rax when your base is under attack
A similar issue to the above, but in reverse. Losing your own rax in return for destroying their's is much less appealing... and it's easy at this point for teams to become badly co-ordinated or indecisive...maybe some of them TP back and some don't. It can easily leave you in a bad situation.
Try to be aware of these situations and use them to your advantage!
There are several tricks and techniques that are particularly important in the early game for good pushing:
- The best time to push is after successfully killing the enemy hero(es) in the lane. There's nobody to draw your creeps away or try to deny the tower.
- Siege creeps arrive every 7 waves. Ideally you want to push with one to massively increase the damage you do.
- Pulling a single (unstacked) neutral camp into your lane will temporarily pull your lane back, but the creeps will then rejoin the lane at about the same time as the next wave arrives, giving you a double wave of creeps.
- Constantly attacking or nuking enemy creeps is fine when you're pushing, you WANT the lane to go forwards!
- Draw enemy creeps away if possible. You can do this by pulling the enemy lane with neutrals, leading them away yourself, or better yet use a minion to do it.
- Normally you'd disable aura effects like 
Ring of Basilius in lane to stop the lane pushing forward...obviously turn on your aura effects for pushes...
- Attack the tower yourself if it is safe to do so. Obviously you need to be careful as they can be very damaging to you at this point. Be ready to attack one of your own creeps to get it to switch targets if it starts hitting you. (even the "intent" to attack is enough, you don't actually need to do it)
- Try to avoid leaving the tower on less than 10% hitpoints unless you can actually take it on this wave. This makes it easy for the enemy to deny.
- Be careful when attacking the tower on low HP if an enemy hero is within range, someone (even a creep) on your team has to get the last hit to avoid the denial.
At an early point in the game, there is no time to have acquired expensive items like 
Maelstrom or 
Radiance which can help with pushing later on - good pushing is really more about skills than items. However a few deserve a mention:
Ring of Basilius
Usually bought for the extra mana regeneration, and improved protection for minions, the +2 armour aura also applies to nearby creeps. This extra damage protection should help your creeps soak up more damage.
Headdress
Commonly used as part of 
Pipe of Insight or 
Mekansm, it offers +3hp/second health regeneration for all nearby allied units, again increasing their damage soaking abilities.
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