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Hey guys,
This is my first post and I wanted to make it a good one. Hotkeys are a huge part of SC2, and I was just wondering about everyone hot key setups. What works for you, what works for everyone? Here is my take on the subject. First of all I am no expert, I am a 2000 silver league player, but I feel that I am better than that. Anyways...I play Terran so I will use my setup for that.
Like everyone I set my CC on 4 or 5 or both in case I am fast clicking and hit 4 or 5 it will still go to my CC. Then this is where I wanted to get some options, I set all my unit produces structures on 6 and tab through the structures to build units. I find it a lot easier to do this rather than having all my racks on 6, factory on 7 etc. I do the same when controlling my units as well, tabbing through them all.
So what does everyone else do for hot-keying...
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I have rax on 3, CC on 4, facts on 5 and starports on 6. I'm pretty sure Trump plays with tabbing through his unit producing buildings. It's just a matter of personal preference.
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IMO, setting all production buildings on a single hotkey and tabbing through them is great. It allows you to easily set rally points for all your buildings, frees up hotkeys for army usage, and saves your left hand fingers from having to stretch across the entire range of number keys. 4-tab for factories or 4-tab-tab for starports is only slightly slower than using 5 or 6, and if you are not comfortable with stretching your fingers that far, then it's usually much faster.
On the other hand, using the tab key to switch between abilities on your units is a bad habit that can cause you to lose a battle due to slow reaction time. If you need to be able to use a unit's ability at a moment's notice, such as a ghost or siege tank, set it to a different hotkey.
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I'm in this exact rut. I need to get out of hotkeying my entire army together but I have 1-5 used up. I currently use 1: CC 2:rax 3:army (i know it seems weird but 3A is amazing compared to anything else to me) 4: Factories 5: Starports and then on good days I will use 6 for arbitrary units like banshees but my control is terrible when I try to use it. Hotkeying everything in 3 is TERRIBLE when I have ravens, marines, tanks, medivacs, ghosts, or whatever. Way too many types of units to tab through to use abilities.
I'd like to set all of my production buildings to 2 or 4 and then at least be able to use 3-5 as army or something but tabbing through buildings is tough once I'm so used to having separate hot keys for them
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I do 4 for raxes, 5 for fac + starports, 6 for all CCs. It makes it easier for me to macro instead of all production buildings on one hotkey. If i need 4 for more units, I shift my macro hotkeys 1 number to the right (5,6,7)
Knowing what unit has priority in a control group is also important (Add in some practice) that way you wont stumble on failing use of stim when u have a ghost hotkeyed together.
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1-4 Army
5 all rax
6 all fact
7 all ports
8 all production buildings ( besides CCs)
9 all CCs
makes it so i dont press tab too much times and make wrong units, so i know exactly what i'm making
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I didn't know you could tab between buildings
I think I'll bind my robo/stargate to the same key
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I think the tabbing thing is good and it does save up a lot of space. Only setback would be I don't think you can set rally points individually if you wanted, but then again you don't have to rally them individually if you want them all in the same spot.
I use the same as you, 4 and occasionally 5 as the CC, 5/6+ as unit production.
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If you set all your buildings to the same hotkey, does it always go to the same type first? It would suck if it would sometimes pick your robo first, sometimes your stargate, etc.
If it's consistent, I may have to try that. I always set stuff to 6+ but in the heat of a battle I never end up using them because they're too far.
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1 CC
2 Primary Production
3 Secondary Productions
4 Secondary Production
5-9 Units(7 is money units a.k.a Casters, 8+9 are harass units or drops)
0 Ebay+Armories
Tabbing is Ok its whatever you feel best with.
Personally i like to have all my production separate as it is easier for me. Especially since i cycle through my hot keys constantly. I used to Tab, but i found it a hassle.
But NEVER fall into 1a syndrome. Its a bad habit. Its when you hotkey your whole army under 1 key. Very bad. Leads to bad positioning and delayed spells, Not to mention you might move your whole army just to stop a drop.
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I keep different production facilities on different hotkeys. In my experience, it's faster. I've played in beta back when you could tab between reactor and techlab. IMHO It's a matter of personal preference. Play around and see what you like.
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Thanks for setting up this thread, I was wondering the same thing myself.
I play random.
1,2,3 attacking units
4 production buildings (for zerg, all queens that are used for larva)
5 all bases
6,7 harass or spotter units
8,9,10 upgrade buildings (I.e. Forge, engbay, armory, evo, spires, specific tech labs, etc)
On February 16 2011 12:32 Leaky wrote:
IMO, setting all production buildings on a single hotkey and tabbing through them is great. It allows you to easily set rally points for all your buildings, frees up hotkeys for army usage, and saves your left hand fingers from having to stretch across the entire range of number keys. 4-tab for factories or 4-tab-tab for starports is only slightly slower than using 5 or 6, and if you are not comfortable with stretching your fingers that far, then it's usually much faster.
On the other hand, using the tab key to switch between abilities on your units is a bad habit that can cause you to lose a battle due to slow reaction time. If you need to be able to use a unit's ability at a moment's notice, such as a ghost or siege tank, set it to a different hotkey.
I do the same. Glad to hear others think it's good as well. I like this especially when I am Terran. Having all the production in "one screen" gives me a macro view of my production.. The white dots being the units under production. This allows me to know which buildings are idling..
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1CC
2Rax, Factory, Starport
3MainArmy
4Harass/Spellcaster/Air (One or the other)
5SiegeTanks/Raven (One or the other)
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There's a lot of threads about what hotkeys people use, you can check that out with searching.
But for your question about tabbing, I only do that for my main army. Usually it's when I have stalker/sentry composition and I need to blink the stalkers somewhere, it's the only time I'll tab.
If I want to micro a group of units back, I'll control click to select all instead of tabbing through the hotkeys. I find it easier as I don't have to use many keypresses and mouseclicks to have to do what I want.
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InControl answered this question on his stream today. He was asked how he manages to use the tab and still control his units so well, and whether it was better to do things that way. He essentially answered that it was absolutely better to use multiple hotkeys.
Then he said he did it that way because he picked up the habit from BW... which I don't really understand because you HAVE to use multiple hotkeys in BW... So I really don't get how that happened.
But yeah, his answer was that multiple hotkeys is undeniably better.
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As a random player, I have a different setup depending on which race I'm playing, but 1,2 and 3 are always my army. 1 is generally the bulk of my army, units that require little to no micro, 2 and 3 are units that require more micro, such as colossus, ravens, ghosts and infestors.
my macro hotkeys are as follows:
Zerg:
4: Hatcheries
5: Queens
6: Evolution chambers (generally 2)
Protoss:
4: Nexus
5: Robo
6: Stargate
7: Forge
Terran:
4: Command Centres
5: Barracks
6: Factories
7: Starports
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I learned about the one-hotkey-for-all-producing-buildings and I agree it is great for giving you a snapshot of your macro in only one key press. And it has a bonus: you can add upgrading structures as well, to keep track on wether you are upgrading or not.
It would make it much much better though if instead of the white boxes, they would show tiny progress bars of the unit being made. One can only hope.
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1. Bio
2. Mech
3. Air
4. Production
5. CC
6. Ongoing upgrades: EBay, Armory
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On February 16 2011 21:02 Ender985 wrote:
I learned about the one-hotkey-for-all-producing-buildings and I agree it is great for giving you a snapshot of your macro in only one key press. And it has a bonus: you can add upgrading structures as well, to keep track on wether you are upgrading or not.
It would make it much much better though if instead of the white boxes, they would show tiny progress bars of the unit being made. One can only hope.
You can always have a separate hotkey for engineering bays and constantly check ur upgrades. Especially when you're using this tab production way.
I think it's better to have different hotkey for units though, because this is what matters the most. If you screw it up even by a very short time, you're going to get a lot of troubles.
I'm not terran. But I don't see why not use it for my evolutions chambers since all the upgrades are there and how important they are...
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In the early game i can see how having different building hot keys can perfect timings. "The tap".
but once you get two of one type, that advantage is gone.
Having all the unit producing structures lets you see your entire production in one go - see any missing white squares (or only one white square if you are getting wealthy)? then click produce some things. Would indeed be awesome if the white went red like 5 seconds before production was finished, or yellow if supply blocked or something like that.
Rally points you can set together, or shift click buildings out (eg remove everything but starports) then set a rally point.
I can see putting all the air buildings on one key and all the ground on another might be a middle ground.
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1) Bio + medivac
2) Mech
3) Air
4) spellcasters
5) CC
6) raxes
7) everything else
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1) All hatcheries
2) Early game: scouting overlord
Later: New expo Hatch
3) Early game: scouting drone
Later: all inject queens
4) Zerglings/Banelings
5) Early game: spawning pool
Later: Roaches/Hydras
6) Early game: 3 drones for quick gas mining
Later: Mutas or Infestors
7) (Q) Evo chambers
8) (W) Creepqueen/Overseer/Roach Warren
0) (~) single hatch for inject timing
Also using both thumb buttons on the mouse, one for cycle hatches, other for hotkeying a screen location.
As you might have guessed, I play zerg
Since the last patch, I would really encourage people to mess around with the hotkeys. There are a lot of possibilities. I remapped almost all zerg hotkeys in order to make stuff faster/easier. Strive to make the mechanics as easy as possible.
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Ok so this has been a real problem for me. I am a 2300 diamond. After watching day9 talk about the tap I decided to try and quit using one control group for all unit producing structures. I stopped laddering for 2 weeks and just played custom games, it was terrible, now I am used to using 3456 for CC, rax, fact, star and can ladder with it.
The problem is exactly what many have said. Once you get 2 of the same building, which happens fast when your good at macro, you lose the advantage of the progress bar. Besides I had a decent imaginary progress bar in my head.
And pressing 3 keys is much more distracting than pressing 1 key to check your macro when your in battle. The largest reason being that you are preparing to press the make unit key as you press each key, with the tab overview you know after you press tab if you are going to need to press the make unit key.
I also like to move my rally point constantly, and this is a bit more distracting now.
Anyone know if any pro gamers use tab for structures. Especially Terran, since it is the race with the most complex structure management.
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I've been watching some of the korean pros on the restream here on TL and honestly, alot of them are just using 1 or 2 keys for their army, and then they just box shit, click the minimap or tab.
Personally I got
1 for main army
2 for anything that needs to be on 2
3 is barracks
4 is factory and starport
5 is CC 1(I will add all CCs to 5 as i get them)
6 is CC 1
7 is CC 2
Mostly these are just a way to get around not having camera locations figured out on a mac with a USB keybord for windows and I kinda want to move everything one number to the right to get more unit control, but it's so hard getting used to! Ideally i'd have
1 army
2 army
3 army
4 rax
5 fac/SP
6 all CC
7 engi bay
8 armory
F1 main CC
F2 natural CC
I'm also considering having every unit producing on 4, and free up 3 for army this way, still haven't figured it out. Anyone with tips on how to get F1-F4 to work on macs would be awesome. =)
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Any laptop players? I know for me, my keyboard is pretty small so I often have to use 1 as my CC's and 2 as Barracks 3 as Factory etc.
It's just really awkward to move my left hand across the middle of the keyboard to do 5S 5S constantly.
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Silver Terran here.
I was keeping factory and starport on same hotkey and liked the ability to tab and produce from them. With raxes on a separate hotkey. The thing that it started to cause a problem for me was when wanting to set a different rally point for each structure. So now they each have their own hotkey.
This change was driven by the desire to set different units on different hot keys. When they all pile up in a huge clump it was my instinct to just box and go 1a. Now it is 3 boxes at slightly spaced out rally points, while still focusing on macro.
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Laptop player here. It's very awkward for me to reach past 5 so:
1: Army glob (I should really work on splitting this up into unit groups)
2: Observers / Spellcasters
3: Production buildings (Robo)*
4. Production buildings (Stargate)
5. Nexus
6. Expansion 1
7. Expansion 2
8. Expansion 3
9. Expansion 4
0. Temporary (eg. Pylon to block Zerg FE that I intend on cancelling)
* If I need the 3 hotkey for units I sometimes bump all production buildings to 4 instead
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Like Morphs I'd encourage players to mess around with hotkeys and importantly, don't limit yourselves to just 1-0. You can set custom hotkeyes that will significantly improve your play.
I've got small hands and I think it's hard to find my way over to say, 8, 9 and 0 without looking at my keyboard. Thus I've remapped 8 to caps lock and 9 to § (or whatever is to the left of 1 on your country's keyboards), where I keep CC and unit producing buildings respectively. Also I obviously use tabbing but I'd like to change that eventually as I believe multiple hotkeys for unit production is actually advantageous.
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Heres a weird one for ya, I play Z and I'm left handed so my keys are mapped to the numberpad.
Just set it up this way recently, was sitting at an average of 90 apm while trying to play with standard keys.. Now I average 140+ apm and it feels much more comfortable.
Numlock. main army
/. micro intensive units
*. Hatches
-. Queens
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United Kingdom1381 Posts
As Terran, I've had all my production facilities hot-keyed for several months and find it intuitive to tab through while microing. My rally points are usually set to a unit to allow continuous reinforcements during a battle. One downside however, is that a Medivac will pick up the unit its rallied to... theres nothing worse than finding an expensive Thor suddenly being picked up during a firefight!! 
My suggestion would be to hotkey the barracks and factories together, while the starports are on another key (starport rally points can then be set to another air unit).
Im currently experimenting with customising the "F1-F5" hotkeys for my units, while using "1-5" for production/tech/CCs as this should be easier with one hand and increase my APM.
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Thanks everyone for the input, really helps knowing all options on the subject.
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EPT
