The following are personal tips that I would like to share with you to help you get better at the game. When DE came out in October 2021, my starting rating was 1100. After all this time, I reached almost 1800. How did I do it? Well, I’ll give you some advice.
-Always play with someone much better: This is logical, but there are people who prefer to play with people of their same level, the reality is that if you want to improve, they must constantly be beaten, that way you learn.
-Start with something easy and increase the difficulty. Here several may disagree, but I recommend that if this is your first RTS, you play with Ottomans, it’s quite easy for news. If you already have experience with RTS, I recommend British, their macro is a bit more difficult but learning with them allows you to cover all aspects of the game. If you want to raise the difficulty, I recommend France, a very balanced civilization, finally, if you feel comfortable with France, use Germany, which for me, is the most difficult civilization in the game because of the multitask, once you learn to play with Germany , you can play with any civilization in the game.
-Learn one thing at a time: One mistake I see many players make is trying to learn multiple civs at the same time and multiple strategies. Therefore, if you start with Spain for example, learn to play Land first, learn the basics and the “meta” strategies. Once you master them, go on to learn more difficult things, like water starts or crazy things like piroshiki. What I mean is that if you just started, and you get a map with water, do not force yourself to do water boom, do what works best for you until you feel comfortable.
-Be didactic: Here I mean that you have to analyze and understand why you lost or won. Being self-critical and not blaming “luck” is part of growing up.
-Don’t be afraid of the competitive. I know a lot of guys who are scared to rank, because they’re scared or nervous. The reality is that losing is not bad, it is part of learning, besides, the ELO comes and goes, you can recover it. Try to rank and gain more confidence, otherwise you will stagnate.
-Reading a lot This is for maniacs like me, but reading strategies, forums, comments, discussions and even statistics and other things from the units is very useful, let’s remember that practice is important, but theory is too.
-Don’t force yourself, play comfortably I know guys who push themselves, changing their settings, their hotkeys or their play style because “a pro told them that’s better”, it may be true, but the reality is that you have to go slowly and always play comfortably otherwise you will be frustrated.
-Use the resources offered by DE: There are some very interesting tools that the game offers you, and that people do not use, like the Record Game, which always offers us the last game we played, it is excellent to see and analyze. To think that we could have done is for the best. Other interesting resources are the descriptions of units in the UI and the bots, which although they seem of little use, if you take advantage of them you will see that you will improve a lot.
-Practice 4 hours per day: If there is an excellent time to play, it is that, playing less will not allow you to reach your full potential, but playing more than that can be bad for your health hahaha
-Other tips These are very good options to get good results
- Play with Bots at fast speed and practice your build order, after 6 minutes of play, restart the game and do it all over again until you feel “oiled”, this will increase your APM, speed and skill. It also creates a weird effect, then when you play at normal speed, you feel that everything is going in slow motion, as if you were Flash or something.
- Look at your recs and that of other players to learn more.
- Play custom maps like Time to Micro
- Look for a teacher or someone to help you, and above all, listen to him, many guys ask me for help in their game and I give them advice, but then they don’t listen to me and do what they want. Guys like that don’t get far.
Finally, once you are the pro among pros, don’t forget your humble origins and don’t let your ego go to your head (these days the ego is high) and go and teach those just starting out how to play, the information is valuable and it is important to transmit it to others, that way the game will be healthier and will reach more people.