Well, here's a tip from a noob: If you want to rank up really, really quickly, mastering the mage is probably the best thing to do.
A mage is the best unit when it comes to dealing loads of damage really quickly; fattygoat even based his entire strategy around stalling long enough to get an early mage out, then "turtling" or stalling out, the entire enemy army until he gets his own, better army out.
However, using the mage effectively is quite another matter. The mage cannot automatically cast spells; the only spell it has when you buy one is its most useless one, blast, which is only really useful against archidons, and even then, poison spray might be a better option situationally.
So, yeah, learning how to use the mage is definitely one of the things you must do in order to rank up; but it's not easy. My advice would be to get a giant mass out before you get your mage. With giants stunning all enemy units, you get more time to cast your spells.
Against an enemy giant mass, an electric wall will almost certainly tilt the battle to your win; electric wall bypasses the giant's armor stat, and it's an Area Effect spell that attacks all of the enemy giants at once. To cast an electric wall without killing your own mage, I'd recommend taking some time to walk your giants right up to theirs first.
Against numerous low-health enemy units, like that swordwrath masser, a single mage with poison spray can kill their army. It's sometimes worth it to sacrifice a mage just to cast that poison spray; It kills low health units ridiculously quickly, and is the main reason swordwraths and archidons are so hard to play in late game.
Once you reach 1600, however, giant mass will probably be made obsolete by the spearton massing you see around there; assuming you don't know, speartons, in huge numbers, can easily overwhelm a giant mass before it starts in earnest and can sometimes even halt a giant mass after it has started.
So, just take the advice the pros are giving you, try not to let that batter your confidence too much, and remember that however harsh or short their comments are, they genuinely care about you; or at least, they care about making you a better player.
Edit: Actually, Ai and quickicks, that's a bug that occurs sometimes when you press space for your entire army, but a mage has just died the moment you press it. You get the mage that died as the topmost unit in the army, but a dead mage can't cast any spells at all, so it appears that the mage hasn't a single spell.
Double-Edit: TheForce, cut the guy some slack... in the 1400s, it is customary to call a temporary Non-Aggression-Pact on Grass Hills, so he was basically just saying that the NAP was over. As for the chicken comment... I dunno, it could have been related to an earlier comment. Give the new guy the benefit of the doubt, you know?
