This is my guide on how to improve in FA. Most of its points are also applicable to other games. Some notes about this:

• There surely are other ways to improve as well. This is just a collection of things that have worked for me in a number of games and did so as well for plenty of other people.
• If your goal is to just reach a medium level (1500ish, top 5% equivalent or similar), you might find quicker ways there than following this guideline. I am trying to set you up to improve to the highest level, and this requires different methods, and I would also assume that not everyone brings the necessary motivation, time and discipline to the table.
• It is generally not possible to follow every single point listed here all the time (human nature), but you should try to do so as much as you can.
• If you are searching for tricks or shortcuts or very specific game advice, this is not the guide for you. I am not aiming to explain specific gameplay scenarios here, I am trying to supply you a method for improvement. There are a lot of guides to help you with specific gameplay advice (you find them in the FAF discord)

With that out of the way, let's begin!

Step 1. Setup.

The beginning of every improvement journey is to set up your game and environment in a way that supports long term growth. This includes multiple things:

• Install useful UI mods. See my other guide for this (https://forum.faforever.com/topic/1186/ui-mod-guide-for-the-improving-player?_=1613225992111).

• Set up your hotkeys in an efficient way. This is especially important because you will memorize a hotkey layout quite quickly and burn it into your brain. If you learn an inefficient setup, it will be hard to break bad habits that were instilled over hundreds of games (I suffer from this problem, and you should not repeat my mistake). Now you might ask, what is an efficient hotkey setup? Well, the default hotbuild setup isn't too bad - an important adjustment i would make to it nowadays is changing the massfab hotkey away from the premium key it occupies, and put something more useful on it. Apart from that setup, there are a few extra keys I would suggest you to bind to some relatively easy to access position:

  • Select idle engines on screen
  • Upgrade (default M in hotbuild)
  • Select nearest idle mass extractor
  • Transport (drop)
  • Overcharge (default O)
  • Selection hotkeys for air, air fighters, land, navy, ACU
  • Move command
  • Target priority for Units/Mex/Power/ASF

It is normal that you will change your hotkey setup over time, but it's useful to start out with a decent layout.

• Join relevant servers (e.g. FAF discord) to get information about the game. You will find links to resources there (Wiki/Unit database/Videos/etc)

Step 2. Decisions.

I would suggest deciding on a few things to streamline your improvement process as a new/weak player (<1300 rating):

• Decide on the game mode. Do you want to become good at teamgames or 1v1? Make up your mind and play accordingly (e.g. using teamgames only as a tool to test out uncommon units, if your goal is 1v1 improvement, playing the game mode the most that you are interested in improving at, etc.)

• Pick out a specific rating goal, that is not massively far away, but will take some time to reach. Be happy once you reach it. Repeat this process for motivation.
  Pick a faction, and stick to it. Supcom gameplay is extremely similar throughout the factions, so you cut down on confusion by learning a single faction first.

• Decide on a certain strategy and the corresponding build order before every game, and try to get a feel on how it works. Change it up only after you think you can execute it reasonably well or if it doesn't work at all on a map (Example: T1 spam on literally every map, T2 air gunship snipe on every map, etc. Of course you will adapt during the game, but the general game plan should be fixed).

• Find a good player and stream to follow and copy what they do. You will not know the correct decisions in game situations at this stage in your improvement career, and any player above 2000 will do for this (Jagged, Tagada, Farms, as examples of currently active streamers). Use this to find answers to common questions like “When to upgrade a mex”, “How many factories on x map”, etc.

Step 3. Mindset.

There are certain patterns of thought that will help you keep an improving mindset. Those can sound a bit uncomfortable and harsh, but this is in your best interest! I will humbly call them Blackhearts Laws.

1) It is your fault. Remember that scene from Good Will Hunting, where Will is told that he is not at fault for his childhood (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQht2yOX9Js)? Well, I am telling you the opposite. It is your fault. You are responsible if you lose the game. You played bad, and you have to change that. Even if it is a teamgame, there is something you could have done better to get a mildly better winning chance, regardless if every team member failed. Do not spend time making up excuses why you lost (cheese that I didn't scout, bad concentration because of bad sleep, etc) but make sure to find causes and try to remove them.

2) Never compromise long term gains for short term improvement. If you want to improve further and further, there is no excuse for taking shortcuts in your gameplay. Shying away from the correct play, even if it's something that will lose you points until you learn how to do it, will slow you down long term. Examples of this include:

• Using UI mods like Ecomanager to patch up bad eco management
• Sticking to certain maps that you know how to play to avoid having to develop BO-independant strategies
• Avoiding ACU fights for reclaim, to not have to micro so much
• Avoiding big unit/ASF fights, because you think there is too much risk to lose them even if you think you have better numbers
• Using cheese strategies predominantly and resorting to all-in strategies vs stronger players

3) Fix your time usage. Your time playing should not make up the big majority of your time spent on FA. Spamming 10 ladder games in a row is massively less useful than playing 5 and then critically analyzing those 5 to find your mistakes and trying to think of ways to not make them again. Playing 5 games and analyzing them is again less useful than doing that but also watching high lvl gameplay/learning data about the game. View playing games as a mere tool to supply data to do the actual improvement work on. Watching high level gameplay will also give you more data to memorize - try to analyze the way a good player treats a certain matchup, a certain map, etc and implement it actively the next time you encounter a comparable situation in your own games.

4) Accept plateaus and frustration. It is completely normal to not improve your rating for a month or so, and it is also normal to get tilted once in a while when on a losing streak. Do not let that discourage you: Rating is not a direct equivalent of your skill, but merely an approximative tool that will over time follow your skill. It is completely normal and common to not improve your rating for 1-2-3 months and then suddenly jump 100-200 points. When down in spirit, think of law 2 and remember that you are in for the long term improvement and not the short term rating gain. You want to play better, not have more rating. As long as you feel that your gameplay is improving, all is probably fine. Learning this game takes time.

5) Realize that FA is a continuous game. One of the best aspects about this game is that small mistakes result in small punishment, and large mistakes result in large punishment. A rough ordering of magnitudes of mistakes would be (starting from the most severe mistake):

• Using your ACU in a way that gets it killed quickly (walking into a bunch of units, dropping it at a very unsafe location)
• Extreme micro fails (losing 200 ASF vs 50 ASF)
• Failing your eco management in any of the usual aspects (stalling power, stalling mass, not spending resources, not reclaiming, etc)
• Playing an inappropriate strategy or inappropriate unit composition for the map (e.g. T3 air rush on winter duel, submarines only, etc)
• Average micro fails (losing a big tank battle in a badly accessible location)
• Having a subpar build order for the map
• Not manually reclaiming
• Minor micro fails (losing 2 tank vs 2 tank at min 3, a bomber killing a few engineers too many, etc)

If you watch a replay, or play the game, you should always keep this in mind. If your acu is in a horrible position, your attention should be spent removing it from that horrible position instead of fixing your eco. If your eco is in shambles, you should fix your eco instead of winning a tank battle somewhere on the map.

6) Use others for advice, rely and trust on yourself to improve. Improving to a good level takes a good amount of time. The reality of the situation is that there won't be someone to guide you all the time, you have to learn to improve on your own. That is why trainers are not a magical aid that will make you jump hundreds of points, but rather an advice dispenser. Use streams to ask the streamer why he is doing something he is doing, ask a trainer to help you find mistakes, but always try to do it on your own as well. Similarly, in teamgames, do what you think is the best move instead of asking others on your team for advice during the game (for analysis, do it!). If it doesn't work, you learned something, if it does work, you didn't need the advice in the first place. Again, this is about learning and long term improvement, not short term more game wins.

Step 4. Start doing it and keep doing it!

This gets its own step, because even if you follow every single thing in this guide, it will be useless if you don't actually start spending time and implementing all of those funny pieces of advice. Good players are good because they did that, they spent hundreds of hours eliminating mistakes, reading guides, watching streams. If you don't consistently spend something around 5-10 productive hours per week, don't expect to become a very good player (2000+ ladder). Those hours are preferably spread out, so the time spent is quality time with good concentration.

Good luck!

So I'm just a retired old man who is as much removed from FAF as the average FAF player is from normalcy. Though, being this absurdely old (and obviously exceedingly wise as well) I want to give my extremely valuable input:

1. It is impressive as hell that the same discussion that was held in 2013 and 2015 and 2019 and basically every year still is ongoing. A very motivated dev (what specific name this dev has has always changed throughout the years) comes up with amazing new ideas for the game/balance/whatever, and gets pushback on some of those ideas, from whoever the remaining top players are at the time.
   Usually, as a result, some ideas get stopped in their tracks, some get implemented. Then at least one or so of the top players get depressed, or more depressed than they already are, and eventually the little drops of accrued depression lead to them leaving the game (usually permanently, or in steps of decreasing activity, inversely correlated to their depression).
   Hence we have the same development year after year: The top playerbase gets thinner and weaker (not just physically). Yet the argument keeps getting made "the game has to change with my amazing ideas, it will finally get new top players, more activity, etc). How the actual banana is that STILL the argument, after more than an entire decade of this cycle repeating over and over? This is so insane it made me write a forum post.

2. Now you might ask, oh, smart and sarcastic BC_Balkheart, what to do?? Well, the game does NOT have to change much at all, as none of those old tasty legendary games have to. (Supcom, Aoe2, Chess as my personal fetish games)
   Tons of changes make comebacks for old players more difficult than they need to be (e.g. me), and are irrelevant for the grand total playerbase, which is weak enough to not even realize what was changed. Changes that are greatly appreciated are things like better sim speed (FAF has done quite a bit with this, its really good), balance fixes that pertain to the egregious issues (absurdely OP unit XY). Things that are also greatly appreciated are tasty tourneys with cool casting and fun settings. It would feed the nostalgia, which is one of the absolute main "selling" points of FAF, cause face it, this game is old as fuck and has very obvious weaknesses that won't disappear. What it has is amazing mechanics that are appealing to a small group of nerds + a great nostalgia factor for old people like myself (and there are more old people, not just me, although that might just be the dementia speaking).

On a final note, how deranged does a person have to be to think they know whats good for the game, if they dont remotely understand it (sub 2500 rating or whatever is equivalent to 2013 rating of 2000), and dont have appreciable experience in high lvl play in other RTS or games. Although I think this attitude of thinking they understand the game is mostly why those people suck too. Rant over.

Good luck boyas (postivity quota; fulfilled)

Day after day I see questions about which UI mods are useful, essential, important, and worse, misinformation or outright wrong recommendations. In this guide I will provide you with my evaluation of common UI mods. As the title of this post will already tell you, my focus will be the importance and the impact of those mods on your improvement in 1v1. My list will have no particular order. If you are above 2000 1v1 rating you can draw your own conclusions.

ecomanager: Not recommended. The autopausing features will hinder the development of your eco balancing ability and instill bad habits. The only use cases for this mod are very specific scenarios like large scale teamgames in controlled scenarios.

Selection Deprioritizer: Not relevant / rather not recommended. The apm/brain energy this drains is not worth the minor payoff for better unit control. Having to switch selection priority in specific scenarios takes time/attention and teaches you bad unit positioning habits. Can be more useful in teamgame scenario.

Advanced target priorities: Recommended. This mod does not directly influence anything, so you can start using it at any point. Useful for stuff like t1 arty drops killing the right stuff.

UI Party: Recommended/not relevant. Not a specific feature of this, but it being not intrusive makes it at least not harmful.

Spread Move: Recommended/not relevant. Small use case, but not intrusive. OK mod.

Idle engineers: Not recommended. Clutters the screen and the default game already supplies plenty methods of dealing/recognizing idle engies.

Supreme score board: Recommended. Just a nicer scoreboard especially for teamgames with no downside.

Better reclaim view: Recommended. Great improvement over the generic reclaim view.

Additional Camera Stuff: Recommended. Adds stuff like functional camera positions and similar. Depending on your playstyle it can be nice. Not a must though.

NoShake: Recommended. Shake is annoying.

Selection Cost UI: Not relevant.

Advanced Strategic Icons: Extremely strong NOT recommended. I would go as far as saying that this mod will completely destroy your ability to improve past a certain level. The reasoning is the incredible clutter, completely filling your screen and taking your overview/ability to select things away. I would suggest you finding a version that only changes SMD/SML if that is your reason for using it, but thats where it ends. You wont be able to develop the gamesense you need if you blind out half of the information the game offers to you. No top player uses this mod.

Disperse Move: Recommended/not relevant. Small use case but not negative impact. Essentially the same as spread move afaik.

Zep_MiniMapZoom: Recommended/Not relevant. I personally dont use it due to not liking stuff disappearing and appearing all the time, but it is a solid idea and I can see people getting a small benefit from it.

Sequentially upgrading mex: Not recommended. Basically a worse version of ecomanager, which I already didnt recommend.

That should cover most common UI mods - if I forgot some let me know.

Tree breaking should just be fully removed from the game.

I also enjoyed the showmatch vs Petric even though it had some bugs for the unexplored mode. In general I do absolutely think that mapgen should become the standard in future tournaments and in general the standard for competition. It takes the game back to economic and strategic decisions and does not allow you to patch up bad on-the-fly decisions with studying 25 replays and spending hours creating 25 BOs.

Probably a good idea to require a certain CPU score or whatever to be able to search 4v4+ upwards.

Ok, FtX is mean. Do you have any other points as well, or is this some last ditch attempt to bad PR him?

Wonder why he is mean?

Maybe because:

• There is a guy running the show here who is perma-afk and who has failed to supply what he demands of FtX for the FAFlive channel, which FtX already supplied (financial overview and a sheet detailing where the FAF patreon money goes, for the past years). If you do the math, there should be a lot of money, and in best case it has been mismanaged, in worst case - draw your own conclusions.

• There appears to be a conflict of interest on your end with the weird Sanctuary thing and the interests of FAF

• There is in general complete apathy and 0 will from your end to move matters forward, its natural to get annoyed when your attempts to do something get locked by afk people who arent willing to do more than set up 1 meeting per 6 months

If you and your buddy big S wouldnt hide behind closed doors and also try to work on stuff more than 1 talk per half year FtX toxcity would disappear (yes yes, Ftx is impossible to work with, etc. - because he actually works).

Nice, great step in the right direction which is all competition done on generated maps! I think im gonna play some games if its still possible these days.

old man reporting for duty

100% agree - Proper casting and coverage of tourneys is essential, including promo etc. Cultivating the twitch channel is paramount for this. As written in the showmatch thread, I am willing to participate in a showmatch.

So I'm just a retired old man who is as much removed from FAF as the average FAF player is from normalcy. Though, being this absurdely old (and obviously exceedingly wise as well) I want to give my extremely valuable input:

1. It is impressive as hell that the same discussion that was held in 2013 and 2015 and 2019 and basically every year still is ongoing. A very motivated dev (what specific name this dev has has always changed throughout the years) comes up with amazing new ideas for the game/balance/whatever, and gets pushback on some of those ideas, from whoever the remaining top players are at the time.
   Usually, as a result, some ideas get stopped in their tracks, some get implemented. Then at least one or so of the top players get depressed, or more depressed than they already are, and eventually the little drops of accrued depression lead to them leaving the game (usually permanently, or in steps of decreasing activity, inversely correlated to their depression).
   Hence we have the same development year after year: The top playerbase gets thinner and weaker (not just physically). Yet the argument keeps getting made "the game has to change with my amazing ideas, it will finally get new top players, more activity, etc). How the actual banana is that STILL the argument, after more than an entire decade of this cycle repeating over and over? This is so insane it made me write a forum post.

2. Now you might ask, oh, smart and sarcastic BC_Balkheart, what to do?? Well, the game does NOT have to change much at all, as none of those old tasty legendary games have to. (Supcom, Aoe2, Chess as my personal fetish games)
   Tons of changes make comebacks for old players more difficult than they need to be (e.g. me), and are irrelevant for the grand total playerbase, which is weak enough to not even realize what was changed. Changes that are greatly appreciated are things like better sim speed (FAF has done quite a bit with this, its really good), balance fixes that pertain to the egregious issues (absurdely OP unit XY). Things that are also greatly appreciated are tasty tourneys with cool casting and fun settings. It would feed the nostalgia, which is one of the absolute main "selling" points of FAF, cause face it, this game is old as fuck and has very obvious weaknesses that won't disappear. What it has is amazing mechanics that are appealing to a small group of nerds + a great nostalgia factor for old people like myself (and there are more old people, not just me, although that might just be the dementia speaking).

On a final note, how deranged does a person have to be to think they know whats good for the game, if they dont remotely understand it (sub 2500 rating or whatever is equivalent to 2013 rating of 2000), and dont have appreciable experience in high lvl play in other RTS or games. Although I think this attitude of thinking they understand the game is mostly why those people suck too. Rant over.

Good luck boyas (postivity quota; fulfilled)

There literally never is a specific point or set of specific mistakes that hold someone back from reaching a given rating threshold. Thinking about games this way is holding you back. The actual answer is: The sum of what you do (and generally also basically any individual thing) at x rating is some % worse than what you do at x+300 rating. While playing, every second that passes during a game with a huge rating discrepancy, the lower rateds player win chance decreases. The only way for an upset is a huge mistake that cant be rectified quickly enough by the permanent being-better-at-everything advantage.

Just make a nice senton tourney no rating limit like we had some years back.

Tree breaking should just be fully removed from the game.

2 questions from an amateur:

1. Could you upload a bigger dataset as well?
2. Is there some webservice or database or something where I can translate userid to username easily?

old man reporting for duty

Since you had the courtesy of quoting me, ill respond:

The quote from my UI mod guide is "Advanced Strategic Icons: Extremely strong NOT recommended. I would go as far as saying that this mod will completely destroy your ability to improve past a certain level."

In the intro to my guide I write the following: "my focus will be the importance and the impact of those mods on your improvement in 1v1".

Why does your post then keep going on and on about some senton lategame that my post is clearly not intended to care about? Frankly, I dont give a rats ass if there are senton mods that make you perform better on sentons, thats why I didnt got into details about certain eco sharing mods etc. (remember that sentons and 1v1 has basically 0 common ground) The "certain level" I mentioned is also not something low like 1500, 1900, whatever 1v1 rating, since the competition and level of play here is low enough for icon mod differences not to be the deciding factor for a long time. Why I wrote it so strongly is that if you get used to it early on, you wont want to switch to something else once it starts mattering. Choosing the right setup at the beginning has great advantage once you climb really high.

As some others have responded, and as I have myself in the UI mod guide thread, on high level 1v1 it matters exceedingly much to be able to quickly see, target, and analyze unit comps or base structure comps of your opponent. If a mod obfuscates that my opponents mixed army (any army at t3 stage will be mixed in a 1v1) has a t3 mobile arty in it and a t3 MML, its garbage. If a mod obfuscates that the firebase has a misplaced massfab next to a radar cause the radar icon for some reason suffers from obesity, it is garbage.

If a mod makes the simple situations even simpler to tell apart, but obfuscates the relevant situations with complex army comps in an unordered base, its absolutely useless. Its very easy to adapt to the simple situations, and not easy to adapt to the difficult ones. If you manage to make a mod that does both, everyone would gladly use it.

Thats the reason why for example myself & petric and some other top players use private mods. Personally I use a very subtle highlighting for SMD/SML/TML/TMD icons. Your assumption that we are afraid of useful UI layout choices is not correct, its just that the strategic icon mod isnt useful for a good 1v1 player.

Then to clear up some confusion or fear that I think I am seeing in your post: The small icon version of the icon mod wont stop you from being good at sentons, no worries. The things it damages are mostly not relevant to sentons, and probably the small benefits offset the damage on sentons. My UI mod post however was aimed at being good at 1v1 and being good at FA in general, neither of which senton has any correlation with. In general, if you are confident that its good for you, just keep using it. If you arent sure, just dont use it, not a complex decision.

Finally I'm waiting for the new generation of top players who are using the icon mod, just as im waiting (since 2013) for any new generation of top players at all. For some odd reason it has not happened yet, but I'm sure the next 8 years will be different.

Probably a good idea to require a certain CPU score or whatever to be able to search 4v4+ upwards.

Could you post a comparison screenshot of the difference in missile arc?

Would be a great change if obs-off games (the standard setting) would mute teammates after they die - everyone who played Sentons will agree