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I'm a toss user of course, so I won't speak for zerg and terran, but for me I think that hotkeys are an inferiour choice to just using your mouse and keyboard shortcuts for 90% of the common applications.
It's far easier for me to click on my minimap than it is to use an Fkey to center on my procution centers. My fingers are too short to reach the Fkeys without moving my whole arm. To do it with my mouse I only need to flick my wrist.
When it comes to actually producing units, I'd much rather click my gateways and then hit z/d/t/k than hit 1 then z then 2 then d and so on. It's way more efficient to do stuff with both hands at once than it is to let one hand sit idle while the other has to move twice as quickly to make up. Obviously, you can use both hands on your keyboard to ameliorate that problem, but is that better? Hell no, then you have to move your whole hand again, twice, there and back, and furthermore you won't have enough hotkeys to run every gate anyways past the early-mid game.
When it comes to controlling armies, you cannot use attack move shortcut when you're selecting your army with hotkeys. Again, it's a waste of hand movement, because you have to press a number then a letter then a number and so forth. It's the same problem as construction, even Progamers don't bother to attack move, they just use right click move. That has a lot of drawbacks though. You waste units and lose the first attack any time you move to a spot that you didnt know the enemy was there. Progamers are fast enough that they can retreat, but even they fuck up and lose stuff occasionally. To me, there's just no sense in it unless you have like 30+ troops that you want to move from one side of the map to the other without actually facing any of his units. How often do you have to do that? Is it worth the extra seconds you wasted setting up your hotkeys? Almost never, I say.
I think that most people use hotkeys just for the hell of it, but there isn't actually any good reason to do so 90% of the time.
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zerg is very different 
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With Protoss you might be able to get away without unit hotkeys, but you need them for production.
Hotkeys are definitely needed with Zerg and Terran.
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I'd play terran a lot better if i used hotkeys instead of drag selecting everything, but it's tough to get used to.
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Strange point of view,
as a protoss player, I really dont know what would I do without hotkeys, and Im sure I have yet to find a protoss that doesnt see a great advantage in using hotkeys.
The first thing that came to my mind was that when you say that its faster to just click the gate and press a button, you are missing the point of hotkeying the gates. When you select your gate, you have your screen showing your base, while you could be microing with your units the hell out of your opponent, while constantly producing, without having queued anything.
Im not sure I understand what you meant by the impossibility of using attack move combined with the use of hotkeys.
So I will just say what I do with unit hotkey that I find usefull.
First I only hotkey the units I have in front line, few goon in the begining vs terran, few corsair, few zealot whatever Im using to pressure the opponent.
Then again if im building stuff in my base, I doesnt have to go see what is attacking my goons to know the first thing I should do is fall back, and its a matter of 1 second, then you might have loss 3 goon to sieges instead of just one siege hit. Just because you had to use minimap, select goon..
Also you might right in the beggining see the importance of hotkeying in pvt, your scout probe in a terran base can survive easily even a marine if you give him constant care, but then how can you keep producing constance probe, build your base, and produce units without missing something. While microing probe I have just to press 1 2 3 and i see that 1, probe is almost done, queue another, 2, goon is soon done queue one, 3, robo is half done or whatever you can follow (could be a pylon or another gate).
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I think this all depends on how dextrous your hands are. I find it pretty easy to hit various far-reaching combinations on the keyboard. I never take my hand off the mouse. It's all stylistic though, make whatever you use work for you.
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United States33587 Posts
you are sort of slow though ;p
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Hautamki is a talented player. I can't see how he could be better with one hand than with two, unless he has a pirate's hook for his left hand.
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i gotta agree with him though lately i have been downgrading my hotkeys, just one (5) to centre on gateways and then manual, 1-4 units and yeh i think its working faster for me too. 4z5z6z7z8z9z i find really annoying although it has its advantages in that u dont take ur eyes off battle.
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Actually I used to play toss and I can pretty much agree with what you're saying, But what I did was still use ctrl groups + attack move and I keyed obs, other than that I moused everything. But now as terran if I tried that stuff I would be terribly slow.
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I still use hotkeys for a lot of stuff. I hotkey shuttles and carriers of course. I also hotkey my scouting probe of course. And, I also hotkey my first 12 units, be they rushing zealots vs toss or zerg, or my first set of goons vs terran. It's the other situations that I was talking about that hotkeys are pointless in.
For example, why hotkey nexus to produce probes? You can always go back to your nexus by pressing space key. If I hotkey my nexus to 0, I never use it anyways.
Hotkey gateways to produce units in the middle of the battle? Who are you kidding? If you're building units in the middle of the battle you obviously arent controlling your units so you might as well not be looking at them either. I can click my minimap to go to my gates and select them and press the keyboard shortcut, and then press space bar to go back to the fight, than you can press 1-z 2-d 3-z 4-k etc, I guarantee it.
What's the point of hotkeying only a half or a quarter of your gates anyways? If you aren't going to use them all, why even build them? When I go to build something, I do it with all my gates.
And Wax, when you call me slow, are you referring to my low apm? APM means nothing, what matters is how quickly you accomplish tasks. I accomplish the same number of tasks as you, I just use fewer clicks because I'm not wasting time setting hotkeys and cycling through them. Personally I'd say I'm faster than you, despite having lower apm. I think the pvp games that we play, where I consistantly outharass you, bear me out on that score.
Amat I use both hands of course, in fact I use my hands far more equally than more people. I'd say that most of you are the one handed players, because you do so much more with your keyboard than you need to.
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Ok that clears pretty much things out
Only one thing of my point of you, you havent figured out.
When you are ready to start a fight, or even in a middle of a fight, you dont need 100% of your time to control units, you need 100% of the time watching if everything is happening like it should.
Also when you do 1z2z3z its easy to interrupt production to do the little micro needed and then continue, but if you go to your base do 2 gate units, come back to battle, go back to your base add 2 units.. it might cost something.
You are also saying that there is no point in hotkeying half/quater of the gate, but there is... Constant production on 8 gate is usually sufficient in anygame to secure your ass, then going manually to handle production from other gate is no big deal.
I respect your playing style, it just that it really fits the need of your playing style and maybe in the end we all have our styles evolved from our control habits.
You are right also that people overuse keyboard, and overuse move, overuse a bit of anything. But there are still people out there that dont give shit about apm, and it's nice seeing sometime rep chart where the guy is averaging 130, but will have peaks at 300, when he need them, and will not fool himself by having 400 in the 3 first minutes then cant go over 100 when things start happening.
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Sweden33719 Posts
I hotkey my gates 4-5 - if you don't do that when you zealot rush (or a similiar combination) you will die.
I then, depending on what mood I am in, either keep keying gates up to 0 from 4. I can use it, it's great for setting rally points to where your army is currently headed. When I played the most, that would win me games. Currently I'm not playing as much and I need to get back into the habit of 4z r 5 z r etc
Hotkeying units does not negate attack move.. As long as you hotkey your units wisely they won't be running into stuff with a move, that is- don't key zealots with goons or hts, don't key shuttles with goons (when my friend does that I always cringe) etc.
The reason you don't use 0 for nexus is because you are not used to it - I used 0 for nex from game 1 or maybe 2. Same with 4 for gate. And the reason for keying 4567890 is that you CAN micro and produce, you don't want to take your eyes of the screen in case something unexpected happens (I'll admit that in the shape I am now - I do the same as you, I double tap 4 and make units from all my gates or hit space, but I was BETTER before when I didn't do that). The advantages: You'll get a constant flow of units, your cash will be close to zero, you can use that little extra time to, say, start a nexus, start an upgrade, micro that much better or storm drop somewhere.
And wax isn't exactly speed king However, I know speed - apm - means jack shit. Look at intotherain, nal_ra, garimto, Daezang etc. All, except for the new and improved nal_ra, used to be/are under 200 apm most games. Then we have wax, who can play effectively with his 100 apm, and a friend of mine who was insanely effective with his barely 100 apm, although now he has got like 150 but yeah.
Rant over.
EDIT:
I have about 200 apm or less any game I play. It's just my style, I get between 150 and 200 in most of my games, with battle peaks of 250-400 when I'm playing PvZ. I use mouse A LOT, seeing as how I'm really fast and pretty accurate with it
When I play terran, I usually just key 4 rax, maybe 5 fac, 09 scan, 1234 units. As zerg I do 123 units early on with 4567890 for hatch, I always key drops, and late game I switch to massive unit keying.
With toss and terran I always key shuttles/dships - even more than one. I should do it the pro way - they key anything they need right NOW to 1, then change around -.- Like dship will be 1 one second, a group of marines the next - or so I remember reading in an interview or something like that -.-
Oh and I use very little hotkeys in TvP, I abuse space key and never use f2 except when I have forgotten to key my nexus and can't space my way back and it's urgent.
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Vatican City State593 Posts
retarded bs. 1a2a3a4a5a, macro during battle while you micro, quickly selecting special units with group keys, cycle through expos with f-keys... those are essentials. you'll never be a great player if you can't or won't do it.
and progamers don't bother to attack move.. wtf are you kiddin me?
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I dont think that was meant to be taken literally T_T
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I would say that at top level of play hotkeys actually decide games.
Like hautamaki said, that is how they can outharass you with macro suffering zero percent.
If u have unit producing buildings hotkeyed, u can focuse more o micro without using any macro time. And trust me that u can produce non stop units that way, because u never check all the time if u are producing.
And if u would want, you wold lose precious time. So with using hotkeys
u produce the same amount of troops from 4 factories as you from 6.
But later when they have more troops they always asign hotkeys to units. That is so you can micro large army. That skill is really precious.
Oh and one thing that makes up for that there are only 10 hotkeys.
Those are f2-r4 keys. U can asign those screens to expands so u check there fast to macro. Or later when u assign ur gateway hotkeys to troops u put entire screen of gateways or factories to f2-f4 hoteys.
Using minimap is just a little too slow, and u miss exact location a bit and u have to correct it. You lose that precious 2, 3 seconds during micro. And at today's level of play micro is everything.
Im sure best players must use f2-f4 keys, at least for nada, because he
builds scvs the fastest.
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On April 15 2004 03:29 Hautamaki wrote:
APM means nothing, what matters is how quickly you accomplish tasks.
haha, that's a funny statement. It's like saying to a F1 driver that driving fast means nothing, what matters is winning the race. Any chance of a correlation between the two?
Please stop staying "APM means shit". APM is a measurement that contains some information about your ability to accomplish tasks quickly. That's all it is, but it's not "nothing".
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On April 15 2004 01:59 Hautamaki wrote:
I'm a toss user of course, so I won't speak for zerg and terran, but for me I think that hotkeys are an inferiour choice to just using your mouse and keyboard shortcuts for 90% of the common applications.
It's far easier for me to click on my minimap than it is to use an Fkey to center on my procution centers. My fingers are too short to reach the Fkeys without moving my whole arm. To do it with my mouse I only need to flick my wrist.
When it comes to actually producing units, I'd much rather click my gateways and then hit z/d/t/k than hit 1 then z then 2 then d and so on. It's way more efficient to do stuff with both hands at once than it is to let one hand sit idle while the other has to move twice as quickly to make up. Obviously, you can use both hands on your keyboard to ameliorate that problem, but is that better? Hell no, then you have to move your whole hand again, twice, there and back, and furthermore you won't have enough hotkeys to run every gate anyways past the early-mid game.
When it comes to controlling armies, you cannot use attack move shortcut when you're selecting your army with hotkeys. Again, it's a waste of hand movement, because you have to press a number then a letter then a number and so forth. It's the same problem as construction, even Progamers don't bother to attack move, they just use right click move. That has a lot of drawbacks though. You waste units and lose the first attack any time you move to a spot that you didnt know the enemy was there. Progamers are fast enough that they can retreat, but even they fuck up and lose stuff occasionally. To me, there's just no sense in it unless you have like 30+ troops that you want to move from one side of the map to the other without actually facing any of his units. How often do you have to do that? Is it worth the extra seconds you wasted setting up your hotkeys? Almost never, I say.
I think that most people use hotkeys just for the hell of it, but there isn't actually any good reason to do so 90% of the time. i can tell your never gonna get any good 
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if you think you are faster without hotkeys you are HIGHLY mistaken, ;\ having to drag then click your units is sooooo much slower than using hotkeys, 1a 2a 3a 4a etc, isnt a watse of time you must be incredibly slow at it to think that. You probably arent very good, but if you dont use hoteksy i doubt ull ever improve :o
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i have a feeling that this fellow doesnt know what he has goten himself into.
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EPT
