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Northern Ireland26351 Posts
Hey folks, I have a peculiar fascination about hotkeys and people’s approaches. There are some great more wholesale methods like the Core or Jakatak’s on here but I’m more curious about people’s general approach in tweaking things and indeed what they hotkey and why.
I could probably do with playing more than pondering such things, but hey we can’t all be perfect.
I moved idle worker to whatever that weird key beside the numbers is called. All army I try not to use but it’s one of my mouse buttons.
Frees up F1-F4 for the first 4 base camera hotkeys. I have quite small hands so that’s a doable stretch.
Space bar is a camera hotkey for my rally as T. For Z I would use it as the edge of my creep to spread tumours. For Protoss it used to be my furthermost pylon for warping but as prisms have totally replaced that I don’t have a great use.
Q is a unit hotkey, I’ve generally designated it as a ‘specialist’ unit, be it a harassing banshee, your first obs or warp prism. Close to 1-3 too.
1-3 are army hotkeys. I tend to change this based on the game state and what I have. Spell priority is a big deal here too. So say early-mid game I’ll have 1 as my whole army, but my blink stalkers are on 2 so I can blink them forward for medivac snipes. Later it changes as the composition gets more technical. I don’t want to be tabbing between units to do abilities so I’ll try split them. Say bulk of the army on 1, templars on 2, lategame oracle on 3.
4 is robo/fac, 5 is gates/stargates or rax/ports. The sole rationale for semi-splitting production is really that I find you quite often want to rally your robo or facs separately from your rax or gateways, be it observers here or prisms across the map, or defensive tanks. There’s less need to hotkey your gates in Legacy but I still like to double tap the hotkey to chrono them. I may use the space camera hotkey for this purpose though in future.
6 Nexus/CC
7 forges/all upgrade structures for T. I restrict it to just forges for P so I can double tap the hotkey for chronoboosting purposes. With T there is less need obviously so I stick engis/armories there. Might stick tech labs on too.
8 incredibly situational hotkey. I bind this with the 0 key. Control + 8 is a doable stretch but not comfortable. I basically use this for shit hitting the fan situations, or stuff slightly more planned. For example in panic splitting workers from a mine drop I’ll hotkey them so I can redirect those specific workers. Or I’ll sometimes set up a worker transfer in advance this way.
Other tweaks I’ve made.
Swapped hold position to D. Don’t like the stretch to H and ASD for attack/stop/hold feels nice
Swapped patrol to Y. Historically I was a lazy splitter so patrol splitting while stimming was easier with a T+Y combo.
Moved basically everything so that any unit with two ‘modes’ or indeed building is done with E and F. So siege/unsiege or lift/land.
Intrigued to hear your thoughts!
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I like all upgrade structures on the same hot key as worker production. Lets me keep tabs on upgrades more consistently, and saves a hot key for another drop or casters or a scouting unit etc.
I like Patrol on Q, not often used for hot keys and occasionally useful. I prefer all production on one hotkey and tabbing, but there’s some preference there.
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Northern Ireland26351 Posts
On July 15 2020 14:16 Fencar wrote:
I like all upgrade structures on the same hot key as worker production. Lets me keep tabs on upgrades more consistently, and saves a hot key for another drop or casters or a scouting unit etc.
I like Patrol on Q, not often used for hot keys and occasionally useful. I prefer all production on one hotkey and tabbing, but there’s some preference there.
Happy birthday!
I guess I prefer having them separate as a consequence of playing almost exclusively dual forge in PvT way back in the day, plus playing Protoss in general.
Can double tap 7 to jump to the forge(s) and chrono them quickly having them separate. Do the same with cyber for warp gate.
Without the chrono mechanic I guess there’s not a huge amount of benefit in either approach really bar beyond keeping my hotkeys pretty similar between T and P.
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I rebound q,w,e and r to unit hotkeys. I use 2 space bar q, w, e, r for units and it gives me a lot more flexibility to control units without messing with my normal building hotkeys/ macro cycle. However I’m bad, so In difficult spots sometimes I end up just using 2 and space and my reflexes don’t automatically select q and w to help me micro spell casters.
I think once I nail this hotkey setup I should be able to manage more complex armies like ghost+lib+mine+bio main army and then one harassment group.
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On July 17 2020 00:24 Wombat_NI wrote:Show nested quote +On July 15 2020 14:16 Fencar wrote:
I like all upgrade structures on the same hot key as worker production. Lets me keep tabs on upgrades more consistently, and saves a hot key for another drop or casters or a scouting unit etc.
I like Patrol on Q, not often used for hot keys and occasionally useful. I prefer all production on one hotkey and tabbing, but there’s some preference there. Happy birthday! I guess I prefer having them separate as a consequence of playing almost exclusively dual forge in PvT way back in the day, plus playing Protoss in general. Can double tap 7 to jump to the forge(s) and chrono them quickly having them separate. Do the same with cyber for warp gate. Without the chrono mechanic I guess there’s not a huge amount of benefit in either approach really bar beyond keeping my hotkeys pretty similar between T and P.
I also bind upgrades to my main building, when I play toss I usually use my camera hotkeys to chrono so it does not cause issues
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Northern Ireland26351 Posts
On July 17 2020 08:36 washikie wrote:
I rebound q,w,e and r to unit hotkeys. I use 2 space bar q, w, e, r for units and it gives me a lot more flexibility to control units without messing with my normal building hotkeys/ macro cycle. However I’m bad, so In difficult spots sometimes I end up just using 2 and space and my reflexes don’t automatically select q and w to help me micro spell casters.
I think once I nail this hotkey setup I should be able to manage more complex armies like ghost+lib+mine+bio main army and then one harassment group.
Where are you putting your production with that setup?
Quite like the idea though. Not sure if it’s just habit or some kind of hand/finger alignment thing I find having things close isn’t necessarily more comfortable or speedy for a longer session.
I mean I’m also terrible, but hotkeys do fascinate me for whatever reason.
What’s interesting watching the real, real top guys is how they swap hotkeys so frequently, or manually select units on a push and stuff. Whatever is on 1-3 just seems to shift all the time rather than being my 1 whole army/2 something like tanks 3 casters setup.
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Northern Ireland26351 Posts
On July 17 2020 08:37 washikie wrote:Show nested quote +On July 17 2020 00:24 Wombat_NI wrote:On July 15 2020 14:16 Fencar wrote:
I like all upgrade structures on the same hot key as worker production. Lets me keep tabs on upgrades more consistently, and saves a hot key for another drop or casters or a scouting unit etc.
I like Patrol on Q, not often used for hot keys and occasionally useful. I prefer all production on one hotkey and tabbing, but there’s some preference there. Happy birthday! I guess I prefer having them separate as a consequence of playing almost exclusively dual forge in PvT way back in the day, plus playing Protoss in general. Can double tap 7 to jump to the forge(s) and chrono them quickly having them separate. Do the same with cyber for warp gate. Without the chrono mechanic I guess there’s not a huge amount of benefit in either approach really bar beyond keeping my hotkeys pretty similar between T and P. I also bind upgrades to my main building, when I play toss I usually use my camera hotkeys to chrono so it does not cause issues
I could probably repurpose my space bar camera hotkey for it. It’s been my production rally/forward pylon hotkey for ages but as the warp prism has kind of replaced the latter I don’t have a huge amount of use for it nowadays.
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I'm trying out a scheme where I have camera locations on zxcv, and I'm also considering moving assignment to different keys (as in, let caps lock assign location 4 which v points to) but I haven't played enough games yet to know if I like it.
This way I can center everything around the home row, no need to go all the way to the f keys which gets really annoying when you also need to hold down ctrl.
I'm considering doing the same for production. I tried a scheme where groups 8, 9 and 0 were mapped to c, v and g, then I bound add to group 8, 9 and 0 to x, b and h, but it ended up being kind of a mess. The idea was that I could just select a rax and press x, or a starport and press h, but I typically ended up getting factories in the rax group and vice versa.
I also put CCs on a group that I can access on my mouse (thumb button) since scv production and fast scans is worth spending that button on, and I found using mouse keys for army control groups wasn't that nice anyways.
Strongly considering binding space bar to rally location like you suggest OP. I really wish there was a way to save your current location though, so that I could press space, then if I pressed it again I would jump back to previous location. I suppose it could be done with autohotkey scripts, but not sure about the legality of that.
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I use the Grid, its good!
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EPT
