Not only did the new release unbind a bunch of hotkeys and assign different ones in their places, I’ve noticed the following logic changes which seem to have undone years of previous patching. Hoping the devs will take a break from their DLC obsession to fix these as soon as possible.
I’ve played 9 minutes of one single-player game and have thus far identified the following:
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The “build” hotkey (B) now takes precedence over the building instruction. For example, B+B has successfully built a barracks since the game’s release in 1999 (with the exception of a few months during the DE beta). After the Rome DLC, clicking B twice just toggles between the initial Build command and undoing the build command; it doesn’t build a building assigned to B as its hotkey. This exact mechanical issue existed in the 2DE beta.
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Scroll wheel to rotate gate attempts to build a building assigned to the rotate (up/down) hotkey rather than giving rotate precedence when a gate foundation is visible. This was also an issue in the earliest versions of 2DE and has been re-introduced.
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When right-click garrisoning into the TC a mix of units which can and cannot be garrisoned (i.e. if I drag select all my vills, plus a sheep that was already walking towards the TC, and tell them to go to the TC, the vills garrison but the sheep immediately stops moving.
Please feel free to add more issues in the comments.
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Point n°1 is because they added a new “cancel” hotkey and it’s bind to “B” by default, it’s solved by changing that hotkey to something else or unbinding it.
I agree with everything else you said, add to that list:
-Any mod that modifies the UI (like Control Groups position, Mini-map position, Resource panel position) will break the UI, shifting the position of most elements off-screen. (for some of this mods, it only breaks when you go to AoE 1, and then switch back to AoE II, but not if you avoid doing that and just use the game from launch without ever going back and forth between versions)
-The infamously broken functionality of “Back to work” that broke with the “Gambesons update”, now has a new bug in which it becomes fully unresponsive (doesn’t even ungarrison vills at all) if said vills were garrisoned after a command queue (shift) instead of a direct command.
-Several other hotkeys issues (some older than this patch that were introduced also with the “Gambesons update” in which they changed some hotkey functionalities), a lot related to “Select all military units” depending on which hotkeys you use for it. Also since then (and this is considered a design decision, not a bug) you can no longer bind unmodified numbers (like simply 1,2,3…) as hotkeys, they now only work for control groups.
The worse part about all the new hotkey issues in general is that they were introduced when they made changes to make it possible for people to assign the same key to several things, and use them “in cycle”. Considering how many problems that brought, and how we were just fine without that implementation, I don’t understand how there is not a production decision to revert those changes altogether to how it was before.
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Massive thanks for the info. I doubt I’d have ever found the Cancel hotkey without your reply.
The back to work thing is really bad – I’m not sure I shift queue vills to garrison, so hopefully won’t affect me, but time will tell.
Really hoping for a production decision to revert back. Not a good series of decisions by the devs.
Just out of curiosity why does game need extra cancel hotkey if ESC does same thing?
I guess one could argue it’s useful if you want to make sure you cancel and don’t accidentally open up the game Menu, that is hard-binded to Esc (cannot be changed) and maybe if you press it twice by mistake it would interrupt the flow of the game. I myself have never used Esc for canceling though, only to open the menu, but maybe it’s useful for some people.
Believe it or not, I use Escape constantly now that I think about it. Never really registered for me until just now, and now that I realize that the Cancel key has existed for 20 years, it baffles me as to why they didn’t just keep the default as Escape to avoid all the confusion.
I hope I can rebind it to Escape…
You can’t. But you can just unbind it altogether, the ESC functionality remains as it used to regardless. That hotkey would be to have an optional alternative that isn’t ESC.
Yeah the game is in a right state since this patch. I really wish these things would be beta tested more thoroughly before release. I’ve got villagers spawning and walking halfway across the map, garrison and back to work behaviour is acting like the villagers are drunk, Hotkeys are all over the place…
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