There 3 main game modes in TMT :

• Solo Campaign : TMT's Solo Campaign is composed of 200 tracks, 50 for each of the 4 environments found in the game, sorted by difficulty. This is clearly where you wanna start :Tracks are well-made, and will introduce you gradually to every element and aspect of the game.
  You will also find some "World Challenges" and "Buddy Challenges". These are time to beat on specific, moslty user-made tracks, so I don't recommend it for a start.
  
• Multiplayer : In this mode, you'll join dozens of other players on servers around the world and tryhard for the best time during 5 minutes on the server's current track. (There are actually several game modes, timers vary, etc., which will be detailed in the dedicated part of the guide.)
  
• Trackbuilder : Where you build your tracks. Feel free to launch it and play around - it's quite easy to handle. However, wait a bit before posting your tracks on the internet, as building good tracks require some experience in the game.

I'll go through solo and multi in the rest of the guide. If it gathers some interest and if I have some time to build tracks, play challenges, etc., I'll add sections about these parts of the game.

One last thing : Nadeo made a cool site to see your profile, browse through user tracks & challenges or see multi servers. I don't really know what's the purpose, but well, it exists. It's here[players.turbo.trackmania.com]. And there's the forum[forum.turbo.trackmania.com].

Trackmania is an arcade racing game with very specifics physics, that focuses on very high speeds and perfect trajectories. It's fun but truly challenging, and this is why it gathered such a huge community around it throughout the years. Uou might find a few tutorials or Youtube videos that will show you some advanced techniques to get faster, but basically, if you wanna get better, you will just have to set yourself increasingly demanding goals, to watch what other do better than you and

However, once you've reached green / blue series, if you're raging on a particuliar track, don't hesitate to go multi ! Contrary to many ranking systems in recent games, you never lose LPs in TMT multiplayer - so go online, find a LOL server and chill a bit. :)



Now, how to play solo :

• White Series : Basically every basics. Go through it and aim for gold. These tracks are simple, short, and will quickly show you most of the blocks and the terrains of each environment. By following the ghost, you should easily learn from your mistakes and reach gold medals, while greatly improving your early driving style. Although, if you struggle on multilaps, settle for silver : these require a lot of regularity, which you'll acquire little by little anyway.
  
• Green Series : Aim for Gold / Silver.Slightly more advanced. Some gold medals might seem too demanding, but Blue / Red Series are an important difficulty spike, so it might be worth to tryhard gold medals before going further. Don't forget that collecting every silver medal is necessary to unlock further series.
  
• Blue and Red Series : This is where things are becoming interesting. Aim for silver. In Blue, you will have to find precisely your marks on each and every terrain, and in Red, roads become narrow and narrower, punishing every little mistake. Tryharding gold is not necessary since you will learn far enough by beating silver, and having some margin for these demanding tracks is really nice.
  
• Go multi. Really. Black Series are fu**ing hard to unlock. Just come back from time to time, grab a gold medal or two and have fun online ! You've already learned far more than what you need to beat some a**es online ;)

One last thing : Each track has a "secret" fixed Trackmaster time. It's fun to try and unlock each of these hidden medals, but there is no ghost to show you every trick to get a better time, and you can't download other people's ghosts (hopefully they'll add this in the future ...), so it's not really interesting to go for these.
Some people are keeping track of approximative trackmaster time on this doc.[docs.google.com]

TMT's Multiplayer is the most fun part of the game, and it's where your competitive instincts might be satisfied. One of the enjoyable sides of it is that you will never lose Ladder Points. Therefore, you don't need to think twice and can play it "for fun" even if you're not good at it. Trackmania's the type of game where no one, even on high-ranked servers, will flame you cuz you're bad :)

There are 6 online game modes :

• Time Attack : You have a limited time (often 5 minutes) to do the best time you can.
  
• Rounds : Each round, players start the race simultaneouslyn and receive points depending on their time on this round. You can respawn at a checkpoint, but Restarting the race means giving up and getting 0 point on the round. Not very popular online, but the game mode used in most esports tournaments.
  
• Multilap : A Time Attack on multilap tracks. Unlike solo campaign, your ranking is based on single-lap time, which means you just drive around the circuit without stopping for five minutes.
  
• Stunt : Each of the previous game modes has its "stunt" mode. Stunt simply enables some gameplay mechanics I haven't really tried yet. However, these are meant to be fun servers.

In the end, 99 % of the time, you'll be playing some sort of time attack. The real difference between servers is the track style you will find on these.

• Normal : Usually a mix of short, fullspeed and light tech tracks.
  
• Short : Some short / very short tracks, usually around 30 seconds to finish. I really enjoy these because, even with only 5 minutes on the track, you can learn it quite well and score a significant time on it. I really recommend these as a start.
  
• Fullspeed : Longer tracks where you usually don't really need to use your brakes. Don't let the name fool you, these are often some difficult tracks that will require some learning and solid reflexes to beat.
  
• Tech : Tracks with tight turns and narrow passages that will require you to moderate your speed and control your vehicle very well. Esports tournaments around Trackmania are 99 % on Tech tracks. (However, if you are really interested in Esports, I would recommend TM² Stadium, which even has a special ESL pack).
  
• Multilap : As explained earlier. The chat is usually quite calm on these, so if you wanna sit down and just drive, drive and drive more, Multilap servers are really enjoyable.
  
• LOL : Very short track where times differ by hundredths of a second, composed of huge jumps, tremendous accelarations, random tracjectories and mostly won by a lucky timing. Great for a good laugh though !

That's where my guide starts. Hope these humble little tips will be useful. If you disagree with me, or if there are some mistakes (English isn't my native language), feel free to comment !