Ability hotkeys for certain units do not work when not using combined ability menu.
This seems to happen for heroes (tested for Arkantos, Bellerophon) and human soldiers (tested for the Kataskopos). For these units, both hotkeys for invoking the ability and putting it on the auto-cast do not work.
For myth units (tested for the Centaur) it seems to work fine - it even uses the modified auto-cast hotkey set in âCombined Ability/Train Hotkeysâ tab in the hotkeys settings - which is IMO expected behaviour - though it would be nice to have an ability to modify these at per-unit basis.
Trigger Event:
Attempting to use an ability while having âUse Combined Ability Menuâ set to off.
Repro Steps:
Set âUse Combined Ability Menuâ to off.
Start a skirmish game as Greeks.
Try to put the Scout to auto-scout via displayed hotkey.
Thank you for posting this. Trying to bring visibility as this has not even been acknowledged after almost a year. I had not given this much importance because active abilities was not a big of a deal at my level and with my preferred units / civs. But now that Chinese are out and most of them would benefit from active casting this is troublesome now (i.e. blinking with Yazi) and requires more visbility.
Iâm surprised someone can even turn off âUse Combined Ability Menuâ since all it does is provide a baseline for what happens when an explicit hotkey isnât defined. This sounds like a programming mistake more than a bug, as without this, multiple selected units (whose ability order you canât guarantee) literally wouldnât have usable hotkeys for abiltiies.
I guess that some people might prefer for them not to show up when multiple are selected, but in that case the devs need to define âprocedural abilityâ hotkeys as separate from the Combined Ability/Train Menu hotkeys. Itâd help if a single unit could use multiple hotkey contexts, but I donât think you can set that?
You can TAB between unit types and use them in non-combined state - it is IMO still far from ideal solution as it requires a lot of attention and TAB spamming, but it works like this in other RTS games, so itâs not entirely useless. If you uncheck âcombined ability menuâ, selecting all units presents you with first unitâs spell.
It would be much better to be able to set custom hotkeys and use them without tabbing.
Combined Ability Menu has an obvious flaw of uncertainty of the hotkeys mapping. As (if I understood you correctly) you pointed out, there is an issue of order - it seems like unit creation order determines hotkey order. But this means that if you create 3 giants: first fire, then frost, then fire, then the order of abilities of this group depends on the order in which you add these units to selection (e.g. from which side you start your box select).
Moreover you also have to track all caster unit types in your selection - if you accidentally select too many caster types, chosen abilityâs position might shift.
As for the multiple contexts question, afaik there is a global (game) context that is always active, so technically there can be multiple contexts active (unless you treat it as no context). Also, Norse infantry swap hotkey context when you change to military tab. That being said I think it would be confusing to have 2 sets of hotkeys for abilities and being able to set own hotkeys for each individual spell, with combined hotkeys disabled, easily suffices.
A partial solution would be to leave hotkey slots for spells constant (i.e. medusa petrify is always third slot (default e)), but this would require careful tweaking, since there can be more than 6 spells available to playerâs units. This problem however is currently present (though slightly less severe) anyway.