You can make Shift keys work by adding them to ‘secondary key’. For example, if your imperial officer is supervising something and I want him to collect tax, then return to supervising, I can make this work by adding ‘Shift + E’ to the Secondary key. Most notably, this also works with Attack Move, so you can move somewhere, the shift+attack move
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This free to play weekend has brought a great deal of attention to the game, however i believe that has come at a cost.
- I have lost countless games this weekend to players with less than a dozen games on their accounts
- My QM win rate has dropped 5% over the past two days (200~ games)
- Everyone I meet in a lobby is so happy and cheerful and says “First game, excited to learn!”
And I get ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED, game after game.
I know this is not EXCLUSIVELY smurf accounts, and some players of other RTS games such as AOE II / III are giving the game another shot, but this weekend has robbed all enjoyment from me. I have been creeping up in ELO slowly for months, and super thrilled with where my progress has landed. Last weekend I peaked around 1225 ELO, which was a huge accomplishment for me but now I’m almost down to 1000 (and falling).
If I suck so bad that literally every newbie coming into the game has a better grasp of the mechanics than someone who has played around 950 hours of the game, then I feel like I might as well just quit playing now.
Curious to hear how other regular players have felt about the influx of new people this weekend, and their skill level.
Cheers!
Hopefully others are having a better time, but this weekend has made me realize it’s time to take a break from AOE. Total opposite of what I expected to happen with a higher number of active players, but I suppose not entirely surprising either.
Hopefully these trash accounts weed themselves out, but I’m not sticking around to play trolls for their entertainment.
interesting , this weekend honestly what i did was to bring my friends to try and test out the game , they like it but theyre newbys to the RTS genre so theyre not good…
I hope you come back to see the ottomans and malians tho!
There have been awesome people too, that’s for sure - hope they enjoyed it!
The smurf / trash stuff is just too rampant in my ELO range and it’s just sucked the joy out of the game for me. I’ll probably play some team games with friends still, but that’ll be like once a week instead of 5-7x’s a week practicing.
i honestly dont like to climb on elo , i played 14 ranked games on this season and i might play a few more .
Im honestly a campaign / singleplayer guy who just likes to play the game at its pace and enjoy…
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I love playing against someone who feels equal to me, and challenges me directly. I think climbing ELO is rewarding, and provides greater perspective of the game as you encounter different levels of opponents and play-styles.
What isn’t fun for me, is playing a fresh troll gamertag with basically no match history, similar ELO from initial placement, but still whoops your ■■■ with a 350APM all-in tower rush that he executes in a way that suggests they play it every game on their other account too. It’s just insulting when they add in “just picked up the game, learning how to play” in the lobby.
Hi guys , i havent made a topic on a long while so today im going to tell the opinions of my friends (since they are too lazy to write on their own in here)
So lets dive at the first impressions :
They both (2 people) liked the gameplay , they played mostly french and english on the 3 days they played
We played coperative vs the AI since they are new to the RTS genre
They liked the art style and the visuals but they said they can improve a bit terrains quality if zoomed out (LOD) truly agree on that.
They both like naval (except me wtf)
And they both have gamepass so i think i have new friends to play age of empires 4 for a long while 
however they have suggestions to the devs
Reconnect feauture , we lost so many games because of this.
the want a full snow biome (idk why)
they dont like 5 min feudal , thats too early for them (they say)
4 Likes
For me this is also important, even when you want to garrison villagers in a building, if you want to take out 1 you can’t, it’s all or none. Also when one wants to take some villagers from the TC to another point, apparently they leave from the longest route. This is horrible when you want to escape an enemy attack.
My guess is that it’s players with a microsoft account who are hardstuck at their diamond or plat rank making a free steam account to get some free wins to boost their egos.
Other than that, maybe they are from another RTS as you said,
It does beg the question, with that many hours of learning/playing, maybe you should have someone (a streamer, or friend whos a higher rank) take a look at some games of yours and help identify problems with your play. Because in these type of situations I immediately ask “what is the flaw in the way this person is trying to improve” because with proper coach/actively trying to improve, you should see an increase in skill, unless there is a fundamental issue with HOW you are approaching that learning
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I think you are in an extreme minority in terms of obnoxious hotkey customization. I think its good that you point out mechanics that are supposed to be there but bugged. Most players dont notice these bugs, because they never encouter it.
You really sound like a pea-princess here tho xD
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After playing a bunch, I realize the only way to play this game is to utilize the “Select all (building type)” hotkeys as there is no hope in trying to mix buildings in one control group. I’ve dedicated like 7-10 hotkeys just for this which brought my hotkeys for control groups down to 5 with no camera hotkeys.
Something similar to this AOE Hotkeys - Google Sheets
Another bug found: Hotkeys are completely broken - #4 by Davidj361
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How do you do it in AoE2?
You also can’t group different production buildings there and produce from them.
AoE4 actually gives you the option with the All panel and tabbing through each type, AoE2 doesn’t even have that at all. You can’t even tab between buildings, you’re just locked into one based on when they were built I believe.
I utilized someone else’s Hotkey config where I had to use “Select all (building-type)”.
See here: AOE Hotkeys - Google Drive
I was too lazy to change the hotkeys until now and assumed it wouldn’t work for an old game. Seems like Age of Empires 2 doesn’t have next/previous subgroup selection after looking through it just now.
I thought I would try out and see if I could port over my hotkey configuration from Starcraft 2 to Age of Empires 4 to see how good a new released RTS was.
Gotcha, yeah you can do the same in AoE4 as in 2 then (plus having the option of grouping them together and tabbing through the types in 4 which you can’t do in 2).
SC2 doesn’t even have select or cycle through specific building type hotkeys at all.
Don’t multiple building types in one control group in Starcraft also have to be tabbed through the same as AoE4?
I don’t think there are any two RTS games where you can perfectly port over the exact same hotkey setup.
It seems strange to me that you are using this as a point against AoE4 when AoE4 has MORE hotkey options than AoE2 or SC2 which are both games you like. You could even set it up to work just like in AoE2 and ignore the additional options that AoE4 has.
It doesn’t, but imo having 2 hotkeys where 1 is for building workers and the other hotkey is building army was really nice. This meant you could control group up to 7/8 armies, workers, harass, scouts, etc.
Yes, I would have 1 hotkey “I” to bring up all control grouped military buildings and then tab through the military buildings via the subgroup hotkey with my mouse side buttons.
See here
True, but I found being very good at RTS was 70% macro where having really good macro hotkeys made it easier to play where you could actually control your armies while producing armies at the same time with ease. Even the hotkey combination to create workers was literally “OP”, i.e. you pressed ‘O’ with you middle finger then ‘P’ with your index finger. For military it would be something like ‘I’ with middle finger then ‘;’ with index finger (depending on unit), then repeat ‘;’ after pressing a mouse side button.
I made a post saying that I did and it made the game playable but it took away camera hotkeys and 5 control groups from me as I need 7+ hotkeys reserved for easy finger access which is a con vs just needing 2 hotkeys, i.e. military buildings control group + subgroup next. But as you know using a control group for all military buildings isn’t feasible in AoE4.
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I also show the hotkeys on the screen and I would like more control groups