Europa maintains ratings for every player which reflect the outcome of every game played. Your rating lets you compare your ability to the ability of other players so that you can get into evenly matched games and improve your skill gradually instead of either being instantly obliterated or easily winning a game.

The ratings are in the same scale as chess ratings. This means that the ratings fall in the 0-3000 range for all players. A rating of 1600 or 1700 would be an above average player who has mastered the basic skills of Europa, while a rating in the 500-1500 range indicates someone who is still a novice, and a rating over 2000 indicates a very strong player.

Generally, it is a good idea to play with people whose ratings are close to yours. Associated with each rating is a rating deviation which starts at 350 and goes down as you play more games. The rating deviation represents how accurate your rating is. The larger the deviation, the less sure you can be that your rating reflects your skill. The smaller the deviation, the more accurately your rating is represented. For all practical intents and purposes, your real rating, of which the computer's number is only an estimate, is within the computer rating plus or minus three times the deviation. For choosing people to play against, stick with people within one rating deviation of your own rating, or within 100 points of your own rating, whichever gives you more opponents to play against.

After each game, your rating will be immediately updated to reflect how you fared in the game. The update process takes into account not only your opponents ratings, but also how precise they are: so a new player, playing against an established player, will have a large rating adjustment since the game gives a lot of information about the new player. The established player will hardly be affected, since the game was against an unknown entity. Once your rating deviation is below 50 points you can consider your rating well established.

It is important not to get sidetracked into a goal of "improving your rating", presumably by playing games against people whose ratings will make yours rise. Remember that the rating is based on a mathematical system that accurately estimates your skill: nothing will make it go up as fast as actually becoming better at the game. Use the ratings to find people at your skill level, but don't let improving your rating become the goal of your existance: instead, strive to win every game, which will improve your rating as a side effect. Also, it is very important to live in a multi-player game: hang on for as long as possible because the moment you die determines your rating. Similarly, it may pay you to eliminate opponents entirely when they are at your mercy, to make sure that they are out of the game before you are. The wisdom of this might depend on exactly how much use that player might have been fighting at your side, however.