I’m going to take the contrary position and say you can get a lot better at the game a lot faster by playing online, simply because it’s much easier to find opponents, you can play whenever you have the time, and games go a lot faster in the vast majority of cases - if for no other reason than you don’t have to physically roll and tabulate dice.
Online = more experience in less time.
In addition, you have an opportunity online that you’ll never get with face-to-face, which is to observe others’ games, save the game history to your computer, study what other people did and how it worked out for them, learn from many more players than you’ll ever meet in person.
I went from ignorant of the G40 ruleset and map to being able to go confidently toe-to-toe with some of the game’s best players in two months’ time online. Granted, it was a pretty intense two months (played 3-4 games a week), and I was a very strong (top 25) Classic player back in the day so I wasn’t starting from scratch, but there’s no way I could gain that experience in that amount of time face-to-face.
A lot of the G40 rules, the only way to learn them so that it sticks is to encounter them while playing, and that’s purely a function of playing as many games as possible. Even with all my prior A&A experience, it probably took a good dozen games just to get a solid grasp of submarine rules, and the strategic and tactical implications thereof, alone.
