Don't discriminate- Missing colors

From what I understand if your hero dies you still do damage in that color but if you don’t have that color do you still do damage in that color. In other words if I do not have a red hero do I sold do damage by matching red tiles? Or do I just do less damage with those because I do not have the heroes Buffs to go along with it?

You can notice during the battle, that when you attack with tiles of a color that is not backed by a hero it shows you a message that “hero is missed” and one tile inflicts just one 1 point of damage.

Yes I have noticed that but I wasn’t sure if it did it all the time and if it will do damage sometimes just minimal

It for sure does minimal damage. As I said 1 hit point per tile. Sometimes you can observe that a hero or a monster with a couple of hit points left is get killed by a cascade of tiles of a color that is not backed by your hero. But, yes, it is a rare edge case.

This can be confusing, from an primer on double colors: