I’ve been stuck in Silver league for almost 3 months now despite grinding multiplayer bot games nearly every day. I see people climbing to Gold/Legend in weeks and I’m starting to wonder if I’m just missing some fundamental skill or mindset.
A few things I’m struggling with:
I understand the game rules fine, but I can’t seem to translate that into a bot that actually performs well against real opponents.
I’ve tried watching replays of top players, but I don’t always understand why their decisions work better than mine.
Some days I feel like giving up entirely because the gap between “I understand the theory” and “my bot actually wins” feels huge.
So my question to the community: what actually got you unstuck when you plateaued? Was it a specific resource, a mindset shift, switching languages, pairing with someone, or just brute-force persistence?
Would really appreciate hearing from people who’ve been through this rather than just “keep grinding” advice — I need something concrete to try next.
I don’t play much myself, so others will probably be able to give you more concrete advice, but one thing that might be worth trying is looking through the discussions around the games you’re playing.
The games you’re playing fall into two broad categories: past time-limited contests that have since been turned into general bot games, and the more popular general bot games.
For the former, each contest has a post-mortem thread where participants share their strategies and discuss what worked and what didn’t. You can find those here.
For the non-contest games, their forum threads also contain quite a lot of discussion about strategies and different approaches.
Reading through those threads might give you some concrete inspiration for what you could change or experiment with in your bot.
Do you have a particular AI Battle in mind? And where exactly are you stuck, what rank? If it’s one of these 4: GhostInTheCell, MadPodRacing, SnakeByte, TrollFarm, I could share a diff of my changes (in C#) up to reaching gold league in any of those (I could also exclude the final change). You could then view them, for example in PatchViewer (side-by-side), or in a GitHub Gist named .patch (it’ll highlight the changes). There’s plenty to learn from the diffs themselves as well as my commit messages along the way.
If the discussion shifts from the original general subject to a specific bot game, please continue in that game’s dedicated thread (if no code is being shared) or via private message. Thank you.