Is Caffeine Secretly Sabotaging Your Quest for Diamond?

Here’s something that might surprise you (or maybe not at all).

Every day, thousands of people do a search on Google, asking questions about coffee. But instead of asking what the tastiest blend is, a lot of them are asking things like ‘Why does coffee make me sleepy?’ or ‘Why does coffee make me tired?’.

That’s unheard of, right? Everyone knows coffee gives you energy and focus and is almost essential to epic performance.

Well, turns out that’s only kind of true. For sure, caffeine can turn you into Superman, but it can also act as your personal Kryptonite.

What Is Caffeine And How Does It Work?

Before I start, small disclaimer: things might get a little science-y. But that’s the point. I’ll try to make my explanation easy to digest for those among you that aren’t intimately familiar with neuroscience or any of that stuff.

Caffeine is a kind of chemical, which, as you might have guessed, has potent effects on your brain. The way it works is as follows. Basically, your brain has a system built in that causes you to either be tired and sleepy or wakeful and alert. This system mostly works through a neurotransmitter, a chemical called adenosine.

At any time of the day, you have certain amounts of adenosine floating around in your brain and your bloodstream. Depending on the time of day and the amount of time that you’ve spent being active and doing things, the amount of adenosine builds up. Your brain also has a way of detecting the levels of adenosine that are present, because it has these receptors that the adenosine binds to (think of the adenosine molecules as ‘keys’, and the receptors as ‘locks’).

Now, the more adenosine builds up, the more it’s going to bind to these receptors, giving your brain the message that time has passed and you’ve been active a lot. So it responds by making you tired and sleepy, to get you to get some rest and go to sleep and recover.

That’s usually how things are supposed to work. But then, suddenly, a new challenger appears!

When you drink your cup of coffee or your energy drink, you flood your brain with caffeine. As it turns out, caffeine has a very similar physical structure to adenosine, so it also fits those receptors. Caffeine then binds to those adenosine receptors, but doesn’t have the same effect – you don’t get tired and sleepy anymore. Instead, you’re wide awake, focused and alert. Awesome, right?

At first – yes, very awesome. But then the caffeine wears off. And now, all that built up adenosine, which is still floating around in your brain, finally gets the chance to do its job. And now you get your energy crash, and you need more coffee to stay awake.

“Okay, so just drink another cup or take another pill, problem solved.”

And that might actually work…for a short while.

I’ll get into the details later, but first, we’ll have to explain a bit how caffeine works.

What Does Your Brain Look Like?! Does It Look Like A B*tch?!

The thing is, your brain doesn’t really like being cheated very much. After a while, it figures out that you’re gaming the system, and it adapts to your Billy Mitchell ways. It does this by making more adenosine receptors, so that it becomes easier to sense the adenosine that is present. And suddenly, if you want to block all those receptors, you’ll need to take in more caffeine to do so.

Again, no problem, right? Just drink more coffee or take some ULTIMATE ENERGY BOOSTER X9000 with 500 milligrams of caffeine per serving. And that does *seem* to work. Your energy and focus still increases, right? So it’s still working.

Well, again, yes and no.

First of all, you have to take into consideration that that amount of caffeine has major side effects, like increased cortisol (your ‘stress hormone’) levels, which breaks down your body, a making you feel jittery and anxious, as well as sending your heart rate into the stratosphere.

And even if you don’t have those effects, what you’re actually feeling is not a boost, but a return to your normal levels (which now feels like a boost). Because of the increased adenosine receptor count in your brain, even a little adenosine in your brain is going to have much stronger effects. So your baseline of sensitivity to adenosine is higher, which also makes you more sleepy and fatigued when you’re not on caffeine.

So what has actually happened is that your brain has cast a permanent debuff on yourself, and caffeine only reverses that debuff, but doesn’t provide that original buff anymore.

So when you are caffeine dependent, every morning you wake up, you are feeling kinda ‘meh’ , unfocused and lazy. Because you’ve been on caffeine for so long, you don’t recognize that this is not your normal state of mind anymore. The first thing that springs into your mind when you wake up in the morning is that you just need your daily caffeine fix to get your performance boost again.

But in fact, what’s going on is that this ‘daily boost’ isn’t a performance boost anymore, it’s just undoing your caffeine withdrawal debuff. So by making yourself dependent on high amounts of caffeine every day, you have in fact lowered your own stats and decreased your performance semi-permanently, lowering your mood, making you feel tired, sleepy, unfocused, lowering reaction time, and screwing with your memory.

And now you’ve come to think that those lowered stats are your original, normal stats, because you feel like this every day (unless you use caffeine again). Pretty messed up, right?

Why Energy Drinks Actually Make You Tired

Besides just regular caffeine from coffee or tea, the energy drinks that gamers commonly consume are even worse. That’s because they usually don’t just contain extremely high amounts of caffeine, but also lots of sugar and artificial flavorings. If you drink multiple of these a day when on a gaming binge, you might easily get over 1000 mgs of caffeine on a regular basis, besides tons of sugar and calories that make you fat.

Let me repeat what I said earlier: energy drinks do give you an initial boost of energy. But that initial boost will wear off once you use them often. Besides the negative neurotransmitter adaptations we discussed above, there are also a few other nasty side-effects from using energy drinks.

We’ll list them for you.

Sugar Lowers Orexin, Which Makes You Sleepy

Aside from adenosine, which we discussed earlier, there are also other neurotransmitters that regulate our sleep and wakefulness. One of these is called orexin.

Orexin is the neurotransmitter that gives you a feeling of wakefulness and energy, in the sense of ‚let’s do it!‘. When orexin levels are high, you feel motivated, energized. It makes you feel like you want to accomplish lots of things and gives you the energy to do them.

Naturally, if you want to go and kick ass in CS2 or League of Legends, you would prefer that you orexin levels were high.

When your body experiences a rapid increase in blood sugar, the levels of orexin in the brain drop. Of course, this will happen when you consume energy drinks with high amounts of refined sugar. This makes you feel low energy and sleepy. You might even feel like nodding off. No way you’re going to play at your very best in that state.

Refined Sugar Causes Inflammation And Damages Your Mitochondria

Science has shown that consuming a lot of refined sugar creates lots of inflammation in the body. This is bad for multiple reasons.

Going back to our orexin story: chronic inflammation is the most powerful suppressor of orexin that exists. So if you’re constantly feeling low-energy, chances are you might suffer from chronic inflammation.

Taking in lots of refined sugar also tends to make you fat as well – but we hope you already knew this – and excess body fat in itself also releases a lot of inflammatory substances, making the problem even worse.

Refined sugar also damages your mitochondria. Mitochondria are parts of your cells that produce energy. They’re literally the power plants of your cells. To have high energy levels, without needing to use stimulants all the time, you want your mitochondria to be strong and powerful. If they get damaged, you’re going to feel weak and fatigued all the time. Then you want to use more stimulants again.

If you want to become the very best in any game, you don’t want to be in that state.

Consuming Refined Sugar Drains Your Body Of Nutrients

Normally speaking, sugar provides energy. The sugar you ingest through food is turned into glucose, which is then transported to your cells, where your mitochondria transform it into ATP, which is the fuel your cells use as an energy source.

However, creating energy from glucose requires certain vitamins. If you consume ‚real food‘ that also contains these vitamins, then there is no problem. But if you consume empty calories from lots of refined, added sugars with zero nutritional value, your body’s existing stores of those vitamins will be depleted fast. This will make it harder for your body to produce energy. Also, this will drain your cellular levels of ATP (so your energy stores), because ATP is also needed to turn certain sugars into energy.

ATP is what gives each and every one of your cells the energy it requires. This is what gives YOU energy. When you run out of ATP, you will feel weak and fatigued. You’re not going to win a lot of games like that.

Do You Need To Stop Consuming Caffeine? Not Really.

If the above heading confuses you, we don’t blame you.

Thing is, natural products that contain caffeine, when used right, actually do have very well documented positive effects on mood, focus, physical and mental performance. Aside from that, the antioxidants and other plant compounds that you can find in certain caffeine-containing products like coffee and tea are associated with:

• Lower risk of heart disease
• Lower risk of cancer
• Lower risk of neurological diseases
• Lower risk of diabetes
• Anti-aging effects

So, those are all really good things that you would obviously want to enjoy.

The kicker is, those positive, performance-enhancing effects only appear to happen when you don’t consume coffee every day. That insane mood boost, laser focus, and god-tier reaction speed only happen to people who aren’t dependent on it and who don’t consume it regularly and in large amounts. The rest of you, who are dependent and take large amounts of caffeine only ‘don’t feel shitty anymore’ after using caffeine, and that’s about it.

So here’s to go about it.

If you want to regain your original stats and undo that debuff, you’re going to have to go cold turkey for a month or so. Yes, at least an entire month. It took a while for you to acquire all that damage, and it’s going to take a while to reset your adenosine receptors to their normal levels again. But that unfortunately means no more caffeine for you, at least for a while.

Then, once that month is up, and you have restored your brain to its former glory, and you want to enjoy the benefits of caffeine consumption again, you’re going to want to cycle your use.

That means you want to only use caffeine sparingly, and in line with when you most need it. So, if you have a ranked game or tournaments going on, you’d want to use some caffeine, but on the days you just do some casual training, you’d switch to something else.

Ideally (but that’s up to you), you should also try to get your caffeine from healthy sources, instead of unhealthy energy drinks with massive amounts of caffeine and tons of added sugars or artificial flavorings and sweeteners.

One way to do it would be to use caffeine on weekdays, and then go off it on the weekend. Or you could do it in reverse, which would be even better.

Another way to do it would be to use it two weeks on, two weeks off, but that might not be the most practical way of cycling. You’d be without your buff two full weeks.

Again, you have to find a way to use it in a way that works best for you and for your schedule. Just keep this one rule in mind: the more frequently you use caffeine, the less powerful of a  performance booster it becomes and the more you’re going to experience those negative effects on your stats.

Are We Hypocrites? Yeah, Maybe A Bit.

Now, before you leave, we want to touch on just one more thing. You could say that Ranked XP also contains caffeine, so that kind of makes us hypocrites. In a way, you might actually be right. And it was actually a big point of discussion when we developed Ranked XP if we were going to include caffeine in our product.

We wanted to make the best product we actually could, that would enhance gaming and esports performance. To do that, we couldn’t get around the fact that caffeine, when used correctly, actually has really potent cognitive enhancing effects (for the non-addicts). If we wanted to make the best gaming nootropic we could, there were very good reasons to put it in.

So in the end, we did decide to include caffeine, but we made sure to keep the amount limited. One serving of Ranked XP contains about 77 mg of caffeine, which is the same as you’ll find in a cup of espresso. If you’re not a caffeine junkie, that should still be a pretty potent boost.

Certain brands of cognition boosters and nootropics tend to brag about the high amounts of caffeine they contain. Sometimes the levels of caffeine are up to 200 mg or more per serving. If you paid attention earlier, you’ll know that’s not really something to be proud of.

We limited the dosage of caffeine to reasonable levels. We also made sure to source our caffeine from guarana instead of using synthetic sources. Besides providing a cognitive boost, guarana has potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, which is a pretty awesome bonus to have.

To repeat our advice from earlier: if you take Ranked XP, be sure to cycle on and off once in a while. That way, you will experience the best results. This is our official advice if you want to enjoy the optimal benefits of our elite, diamond-tier performance enhancer. If you want to max out your health and performance stats, this is the way to go.

In the future, it is very likely that we will release a decaf version, so you’ll be able to cycle and still enjoy the benefits of the other ingredients.

One final suggestion. If you want to have lots of energy without the constant need for energy drinks and other stimulants: eat healthy, work out, and get enough sleep 🙂

Age of Empires II Strikes Back…again

A few years ago, in 2019, the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires II (also commonly referred to as AoE II or AoE 2) dropped. This was the third version of the game released after the OG version in 1999 and then the HD version in 2013, almost 15 years later.

For many players, this version might be their first encounter with AoE II. While the game is simple to learn, it’s difficult to master. If you don’t have a decent grasp of the fundamentals, it’s guaranteed that you will be slaughtered when playing online.

Maybe a starting guide to online multiplayer would be in order. We might be a bit late to the party, but alright, here goes.

What Does Your Elo Rating Mean?

In Age of Empires II, your skill level is expressed through the Elo rating system. This is a rating system that was originally invented for ranking chess players but has also seen use in other games, including video games. In the past, it has also been used to rank people on Tinder. (But this post isn’t about the dating game.)

The Elo rating is a measure of your relative strength in comparison to other players, and the odds that you will win against another player depending on both your relative Elo rank. So the difference between your Elo ratings is used to calculate your chance of winning.

I’m not going in-depth on the mathematics of the system, but statistically speaking, the more your scores differ, the more likely it is you will lose/win.

If you are interested in the way your Elo is calculated, however, you can watch this video:

Elo rating matters in determining your skill level, but it is always relative to the skill of all the other players. If you suck at Age of Empires, but 99 % of all other players suck even harder, you’ll still have a high Elo rating.

The Road to 1000 Elo

In the Definitive Edition of Age of Empires II, every new player starts with an Elo rating of 1000 in Ranked play. If you’re new to the game, this will probably be way too high for you. If you’re a veteran of the original game and/or the HD Edition and you were a decent player, this is likely about right or even too low.

New players usually drop to about 500 Elo pretty fast after a few matches, which is kind of the standard for ‘normal newbies’. If you really suck at the game, it will be even lower of course. If you’re a n00b but have a decent grasp of the game and a decent strategic insight, chances are you might be a bit higher than 500 Elo.

The relative nature of your Elo rating means that getting to 1000 Elo would have been easier when the game just came out and everyone was still a n00b. However, in general, there’s always going to be a subset of players who might play a lot of AoE II, but keep playing it the wrong way. They don’t do the homework and effort to try and actively improve (since you’re reading this, I’ll assume you’re not one of them).

This isn’t a reproach towards those people, by the way. AoE II already has an experienced player base that is just really good. Some players have been playing this game for 25 years!

However, some people just want to play for fun. They aren’t interested in being the best. They don’t feel like watching hours’ worth of YouTube tutorials and replays. They’re not doing hours of active, deliberate practice. And that’s okay.

But lucky for you, these are usually the kind of people that you are going to encounter when you play below 1000 Elo. Some of them might have a decent amount of experience, but they can be beaten with relative ease if you follow the basic principles I’m going to outline in this article.

Play Age Of Empires II Like You’re Michael Jordan

What does Age of Empires II have in common with basketball? On the surface level, not very much. The first one is all about clicking a mouse and pressing hotkeys, the other one involves lots of running, jumping, and throwing a ball.

On a deeper, meta-like level, however, there are similarities. If you want to become really good at something, you have to start by mastering the fundamentals, even when you are already supposedly really good. This is something Michael Jordan, the ’90s basketball superstar, understood very well.I quote:

You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the level of everything you do will rise. – Michael Jordan

This is why you need to learn the fundamentals of the game. When you learn the fundamentals, you’ll know what to do in every situation.

In basketball, this means practicing your shots and teaching yourself perfect form. It involves mastering your footwork and your balance when holding and playing the ball. Do this enough and playing like a pro becomes effortless.

In Age of Empires II, this means you know the strengths and weaknesses of each unit. It means you know in which situation you should use them and how to use them for maximal effectiveness. For every powerful unit that seems invincible, there is another unit that completely wrecks it. It also means learning about build orders, hotkeys, and resource management. Combining a deep mastery of these fundamentals can turn you into a feared opponent.

You don’t have to figure everything out yourself. YouTube channels such as Hera and Spirit of the Law have extensive and detailed videos on almost every aspect of the game. They cover all the basics you need to know, but also the more advanced elements of the game.

Some Basic Principles To Live By

• Always keep an eye out: keep scouting and take note of what your opponent is doing. If you know what’s coming, you can prepare a counter for it. If you see a lot of cavalry in his base, you know you need to make spearmen. Notice a hole in his base defense? You can exploit that.
• Conversely, try to hide your plans from the enemy. All warfare is based on deception. If you’re going for a cavalry rush but your opponent sees you building lots of stables, prepare to find lots of pikemen when you reach his base.
• Spend your resources as much as possible and use them for the right things. If you have an excess of wood but no food, you need to transform that wood into food by building more farms. Don’t forget to also use the market to balance things out. Resources that aren’t being used are worthless.
• Only spend resources on things that align with your strategy. Don’t spend money on expensive Imperial Age upgrades for units you hardly use.
• Pick your fights wisely: resources are scarce. Use the right units to counter to make each battle more expensive for your opponent than it is for you.
• Don’t lose hope too soon: that big army coming towards your base might demoralize you, but it could also be your opponent’s last-ditch effort. You’re not playing perfect and might make mistakes here and there, but so will he.

Learning Counters By Heart

One of the most crucial skills you need to develop in Age of Empires II is learning the strengths and weaknesses of each unit in the game. If you’re just starting and you think your expensive, heavily armored, fully upgraded paladins will make short work of those cheap halberdiers, you are going to be in for a nasty surprise. But that’s something you’ll learn soon enough.

The fact that battering rams are for breaking down buildings might seem intuitive, but what about those ballistas? What are those for? And what is the best use for a mangonel? Why would you even make monks – after all, they’re slow, expensive, can’t attack, and die really fast.

Each unit in Age of Empires II is a tool that has a specific use. If you are not fully able to grasp that use, you will not be able to use your tools effectively. It’s like trying to use a wrench to hit a nail when you have a perfectly fine hammer lying next to you.

Some units are very easy to learn: spears kill cavalry, skirmishers counter archers. Then you have more exotic units, like camels, which is a cavalry anti-cavalry unit. There are cavalry archers, which are both archers and cavalry, and can handle pikemen a lot better.

Start with the basic units. Once you get those down, it’s time to move on to the units that are specific to each civilization. Some of those can be relatively simple too. Teutonic Knights are just extremely powerful and slow swordsmen. Briton Longbowmen are archers with a really long range. But then you’ve got your Throwing Axemen, a ranged unit that does melee damage. How do you deal with those?

Here’s another video to help you out with that:

Figuring out what each unit is good for in a specific situation is an important basic skill, for two main reasons:

• You waste a lot of resources by not countering properly.
• Not knowing how to react can cause you to panic and make you indecisive. This makes you lose your sense of strategy. Then you start doing stupid things.

When you are playing the game, and you’re confronted with a certain unique unit, you might not know how to react. It’s kind of difficult to take a look at a YouTube video while you’re busy playing a ranked match. (you could pause the game, but that would be a bit of a dick move towards your opponent).

That’s why we suggest that you keep a cheat sheet next to you, with an overview of the available counters. An easy way to do this is to ask ChatGPT to generate one for you, and then print it out and keep it next to you on your desk.

Once you figure out the basics for each unit, move on to the next level: combinations. How do you react when you see pikemen combined with archers? Or cavalry mixed with Teutonic Knights? Most likely, you’ll need to combine units yourself.

Knowing what to do in these situations is key. If you react slowly or in the wrong way, this can cause a quick and decisive loss. By the end of a game, it’s common to see a combo of three different units marching side by side. You’re going to want to know how to untangle that web.

Know Your Enemy

Age of Empires II has many different civilizations. They also keep adding more every year. The way things are going, you can expect every medieval village to get its own civ and unique unit.Each of these civilizations has strengths but also weaknesses.

Although 90 % of the unit roster is going to be the same for each civilization, 10 % is going to be different. That 10 % can make a complete difference in how the game is played.

Knowing what civ your opponent is playing means that you know his strengths and weaknesses and know what strategy he is going to use to give you a bad time. If you are up against a cavalry civ, you know that at some point your opponent might come at you with heavy cavalry archers. That means it might be a good idea to have some skirmishers on hand.

Then there are the unique civ bonuses and team bonuses, which are also going to dictate how the game is played. For example, the Huns are instantly at 200 max pop cap, removing the need to build houses entirely. Other civs are going to have bonuses when collecting certain resources or have bonuses to unit stats.

Knowing what civ your opponent is playing allows you to figure out how he’s going to play and what you need to look out for. To prepare for this, I suggest you try playing all different civs a few times, even if you don’t particularly like to play them. This gives you real-life experience in how they play, what they are good at, and what they are not so good at. It will help you find potential weaknesses you can exploit.

Your Objective In Each Specific Age

No two games of AoE II are going to be the same. Maps are randomly generated, the competing civs might differ, and the build orders and the strategies used are going to differ depending on the circumstances.

However, you should still aim for a certain specific objective in each Age, and in general, that is not going to differ a whole lot if you want to win consistently. So here is what you should be aiming for in each Age, and every decision you make needs to facilitate that goal.

Dark Age

• Dark Age is simple: get to the Feudal Age in the fastest time possible.
• A side objective is going to be: to set up your economy so you don’t hit a bottleneck once hitting the Feudal Age – for example having enough villagers on wood so you don’t have to wait to research the economy techs and build enough farms. But this must be done within reason and can’t significantly affect your time to Feudal.

For a perfect Dark Age, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You can use this guide by Hera to guide you through.

Feudal Age

• The primary objective of the Feudal Age is again to get to the next Age ASAP. Getting to Castle Age first significantly increases your chances of winning. This is because you can expand your economy and get access to powerful units (and Castles, obviously) in the Castle Age.
• Equally important is establishing a basic defense – wall off your base with houses, other buildings, and palisades. Complement this with a few units (usually spearmen) to protect your vulnerable resources.

• A side objective here is to create a few units – usually some men-at-arms and/or archers – to hit your opponent’s economy if it is vulnerable. This is mostly to slow him down from hitting Castle Age before you do. Do this within reason or it will slow your progression to Castle. So don’t go building an army of 20 men-at-arms.

Castle Age

In Castle Age, you get a lot more powerful tools at your disposal – heavy infantry, siege, Castles, and your unique Civ unit. Your economy will multiply thanks to the ability to build extra Town Centers. A lot more options will open up.

• Expand your economy by building extra Town Centers (try to have at least three).
• Start going on the offensive, find your opponent’s weak spots, and exploit them.
• Spend all your available resources – gold doesn’t kill people, swords kill people.

Try to control the map and its resources and deny your opponent control.

Imperial Age

The way the game is played in Imperial doesn’t significantly differ from Castle Age. You mostly just get bigger swords (and guns, thanks to the addition of gunpowder units).

• Make more villagers, max out your economy and get to the maximum population if you haven’t done so already.
• Keep expanding, and build more military buildings to increase recruitment rate (wood comes cheap after all).
• Focus on controlling the map and limiting your opponent’s possibilities.If you keep doing this, attacking and countering resource-efficiently, control the gold and the map eventually your opponents are going to run out of resources, and effectively lose their ability to continue fighting. This is usually when they resign and you win.

Under 1000 Elo, if you stick to the fundamental rules laid out above, you will win 8 times out of 10. That’s enough to get you to 1000 Elo pretty fast.

Getting To 1000 Elo In A Month

When I was still below 1000 Elo, applying the above strategies consistently got me a win rate of about 80-90 % in AoE II. Hitting 1000 Elo took me a little less than a month at about 3 games per day. Once you get to 1000 Elo, you can consider yourself at least an ‘average’ player.

In truth, the tactics and strategies used in each game can vary depending on your playstyle. However, some general principles apply consistently.

Getting to 1000 Elo just requires you to do the following:

1. Have the right objective at each Age and do the right things to achieve that objective.
2. Learn the counters for each unit and counter resource-efficiently.
3. Scout your opponent early to make sure you know what he’s up to.
4. Don’t leave your resources unspent. Use the market to transform excess resources into those that are scarce.
5. Most importantly: watch ALL your replays and learn from them. CaptureAge is a beautiful tool.

Don’t try to work on everything at once. Use each game to work on one skill that you try to master. Over time, these different puzzle pieces add up and combine into a master strategy. (Additionally, you could also try using RANKED XP to help you focus better while playing.)

Now go forth and conquer.