Improving My Chess Rating from 180 to 800 Elo
- This topic has 13 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 1 year, 11 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Reviewing my replays and watching my opponents’ replays was the most helpful for me in improving my ladder performance.
It helped me to identify my mistakes and understand what my opponents were doing differently.
I also found it useful to focus on early aggression and economy.
Understanding that my opponent’s “all in” strategies often meant they had no plan B or economy, allowed me to play out the game and come back from a deficit.
Lastly, I found it important to keep producing villagers, especially in the later stages of the game.
This allowed me to keep up with my opponent’s production and have a better chance of winning.
180 to 800 is quite a jump – congrats on that!
​
Things that helped me climbing from 500 to 900 (almost 1k, my PB is 992):
1.
Have more trust in your units and don’t panic when you see one or two counter units
2.Have 5 villagers at max working on one lumber camp for maximum efficiency
3.Never stop vill production – in my games in the 600/700 region, I used to basically halt vill production at ~50ish vills
4.Don’t let your early economy rely on Dark Age farms – I used to seed 2 Farms for my 22 pop Scout before I finally also made use of straggler trees and seeded Farms from the Feudal Age on
5.Against trushes, your best defense is attacking towers with villagers
6.Don’t Fast Castle with 27+2 villagers
​
And something more in general: see Town Bell as a noob trap and don’t use it.
Applies ‘80%+ of the time’ advice:
– Spend your resources consistently as they come in at all points throughout the game.
– Anticipate needing more production buildings to avoid having queues longer than 2-3.
– Don’t take fights you expect to lose.
– If you are facing an unbeatable death ball, raid to force them to split the army up and play for time at home with castles and building your own seige to snipe their seige to slow down the push.
– All things being equal, a slightly bigger army will defeat a smaller army *and extend its relative numbers advantage further* through the fight.
You can start to snowball fast from initially very small advantages.
– If you are playing from behind, matching the opponent’s strategy is often a losing move.
Instead do something asymmetrical: play more greedy or more aggressive on lower eco.
– Building outposts is a good use of APM in a passive game
– Don’t build forward castles in mid castle age if you expect your opponent to be in imp faster
– Avoid overreacting as well as underreacting
– Monk conversions are worth X2 units.
It’s a huge swing and they are underutilised at lower elos.
– Fletching and bodkin can be worth it for the increased TC damage if you are being raided.
– If you are comfortably ahead, anticipate the natural tech switch from your opponent and prepare
– Try to know where the enemy army is at all times.
Track it if possible.
– Pushing or raiding?
That gives you the map pressure to secure neutral golds and other parts of the map.
– Most mere mortal players struggle at defending so default to being aggressive.
– Look at how good players ‘wall to the TC’/make their TC part of their wall.
– Hotkeys should mean you can make vils and army without looking back at your base.
Didn’t even know 180 elo was possible
> Even if you don’t have castle age, switch back and forth between your view and your opponents to see a 2 Vil gap turn into 15-20 pretty quickly.
Absolutely use CaptureAge for this.
You will have a view of both your stats and the opponent’s without having to switch POV.
You will also have an idle TC counter.
It’s a super helpful tool 🙂
Learning to defend against 1k Elo scout rushers improved my ladder performance and made the game a lot less frustrating to play.
Scouting and outposts.
Hard to come up with a good plan when you don’t know what your opponent is doing.
Discovering all the different hotkeys.
This goes beyond pressing buttons instead of clicking icons, I’m talking about hotkeys like “select all military buildings” that may not have a button anywhere.
Survivalist’s production calculator gave me a better grasp of what my vil count represents.
Instead of reaching Castle Age with more military buildings than I can afford to produce from, I spend the extra wood on farms so I can boom or attack harder.
The main things I think are gatekeeping me from 1400 are Mongol players who win in early Castle Age, only knowing how to play Arabia, losing too much time when pressured early, having an underdeveloped “boom and defend” playbook, and half-assing my walls.
I don’t auto economy.
I accidentally tapped into that menu and regretted the entire match because I couldn’t tell my villagers what to do to an extent.
I appreciate all the advice you dropped.
Things that helped me from 800 to 1100:
1.
Scouting at all points in the game, always knowing what my enemy plans next.
2.
Learned a variety of strategies and how to counter them, learned to play archer snowball, drush FC, tower rush etc.
3.
Finding a civ that suits my playstyle, I tend to tech switch a lot so Chinese was a good fit once I got the start down.
The most important thing I learned that made me jump from 1000 to 1200 is learning at least one build order
From 1300 to 1400 was learning another build order.
From 1400 to 1500 I had to learn 4 and how to counter them.
From then one is correcting your misplays and choosing the right strategy
My biggest change from 300 to 900 was hot keys, and learning you could make more than one production building
Tbh with the amount of idle time and bad macro someone super low elo should have, those info are worthless.
Won’t make a difference guessing uptime, it only works when both players have clean builds.
What you really need to learn is to select tc hotkey and Q every 10 sec or so without the need to think about it, if you manage to reach castle age with 0 idle you can win with whatever strat vs any sub 1000 elo easily
I frankly was never a low elo bar my introductory course.
I had a fundamental concept of how to play standardly by watching pros sotl and practicing vs ai until i could keep pace with it economically.
The first curve ball i had was understanding the fundamental differences between a human and ai.
Second was learning all the openings and how to best retaliate to them.
I played early without a fundamental build order I had a framework of one, 6 sheep 3-4 wood then berries boars houses in whatever order i feel.
Beyond that was just practice.
More Consistency.
More experiences.
More mimicry of pros and pocketing tricks and ideas from them.
Nowadays when i play making actions is generally like breathing unless its a new idea.
I know where deficiencies start earlier and earlier (such as lacking food for feudal or lacking wood for feudal buildings), i know how fights will go better, micro is getting better.
Just remember perfection isnt something that can be practiced its just a goal you can rarely achieve towards.
In this game the prase ‘plans rarely survive contact with the enemy’ rings true.
As someone who never left the 950-1050 range, I love to see these stories of LEL climbing and learning… every time I feel I’ve improved in the game, when I go to ladder, I feel my cohort has improved more hehehehehe
[removed]
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
