First day playing ranked

After playing against AI and a group of friends (I'm the newbie), I had some time and tried on-line games for the first time today. I've progressed from being the worst in my friend group to the best against people who have been playing awhile, so I thought I would try some 1v1 matches. I consistently win 1v1 against Moderate AI, about 60% of the time against Hard AI, and have beat Extreme once.

I thought it was interesting to see the different strategies. I played as Incans and tried to tower rush (always drives the AI batty, but not too good at it yet).

First game I played was against someone who had a ton of games and was around 1000 ELO. My tower rush didn't work out too well (distracted him for a few minutes), and I didn't respond well to a scout rush. I kept pushing, but couldn't get my economy going like I wanted, and I noticed he just kept building castles around me. Went an hour and I wasn't able to match to get the towers down, finally resigned. He said he was trying to get me out with just castles, which I found hilarious.

Second game I was against someone who was also new and only had a few games under his belt. I did a tower rush and apparently after I got towers by his gold and berries, it was too much, so he resigned. Seemed frustrated.

Third game was what I would expected going in. 800 ELO with hundreds of games player. By the time I tower rushed as we were both getting to feudal at the same time, he was already walling and took out my Incan villagers with his Spanish villagers. I couldn't get in to tower rush so I focused on booming and got about 50 military and a tower near my base. I fended off his initial scout rush (about 15 scout calvary) but never got to go in. In the end, he sent an army of trebs and conquistadores and I couldn't defend well enough so had to resign. The player was a jerk in chat afterwards but I'd expect that from an on-line game.

Anyway, it was fun and I'm glad I finally jumped in. Way less predictable than the AI, and I think my ELO has a long way to fall.