Where do I start? The bots don't work. Why? Because the map that tells the bots where they can and cannot go does not get changed by building game structures. Therefore, they are useless stuck turrets with autoaim.

Playing online with a certain number of players is required to advance the profile. It isn't that exciting to get XP but you do need to unlock the gizmos to be competitive.

The best tips are to watch others, communicate in game, and read the thousands of other posts on that subject.

Last, hosting your own matches is rather worthless, because of the number of changes we have learned to make to the default configs, and adding mods and features. We don't all agree what changes to make, what features are most important, and which mods need changes, but we do agree that vanilla is not the way to go.

Bots will not give exp unless there's atleast eight other players. I think you can still earn achievements on a local server.

We host events every couple weeks and bring tons of players online. You should join us on discord and on steam. https://discord.gg/2AKetQ7, https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/groups/RedstoneND

The event we hosted yesturday went so excellent, there will be anther one this month!
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1434630274
Redstone, Bootcamp and Beta have commander tutorials which reduce the learning curve. Beyond that, the best advice I can give you - is to destory structures. The exo seige kit class is best suited for this purpose. These servers also rebalance grenadier kits with more structure damage.