Grid Hotkeys are a mess

DE thankfully came with an option for grid hotkeys (which i really like). It is implemented very poorly in my mind though.
Here are the main things thats annoying me:

  1. Units are not consistent for different civilisations. So skirmisher is not allways in the same spot. Meaning if you play French and switch to dutch you’ll queue in wrong units all the time. In my mind: Melee infantry should be consistently on one spot in the grid, so does musketeers, skirmishers, and crossbows. The same thing should be done for stable foundry etc.
  2. Like point 1, the same goes for buildings. The worst part is that for asian civs the buildings are rearranged for no apparent reason. Why is the house Q for all euro civs, but for Asian civs it s A? Despite European villagers having TCs too. What makes things worse for buildings is that a building doesnt even stay consistent during one game. So if you send the Fort card where your explorer can build forts, your previous TP hotkey becomes the fort hotkey.
  3. Some very important commands are NOT on the grid. This is especially true for the attack command and the TC ungarrison command. This is annoying because there would still be space on the grid!

I might have forgotten something, but these are the most frustrating things for me.

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Is there a way to share the hotkey setup? Would you mind sharing your file with me? I wanted to do it and also started, but postponed it since it took too long (and still play with grid hotkeys)

If there is one thing in this game that I don’t assign to hotkeys is unit production.
Units are way too different across civs. You will waste less time clicking with mouse than trying to remember the hotkey everytime u change civs. Plus, if u wanna cancel one particular queue, you would have to use the mouse anyway.

For buildings, i have my own hotkeys by using the user.con file. Since I don’t like the ones that come with the game.
Like you pointed out, the grid is very inconsistent. Do yourself a favor and force every single building to one particular key.

I’m curious to see your hotkeys for china lol

Too confusing for me. But i guess u got used to it.

I don’t think unit production need hotkeys tbh. It’s only useful in treaty or deathmatch. But I don’t really find myself missing them in treaty.
Maybe I’ll try to come up with my own hotkeys at some point.

It might be a problem to me though cause all my building hokeys are single-press. I don’t use ctrl, shift, alt, etc.
My only unassigned letters are J, U and V. lol

It doesn’t matter to me if it’s in the left side or right side.
What I like to do is try to keep every useful hotkey as single press.
For example I would prefer to use the letter K as a single press, than Ctrl + A.

Just want to disagree with you here. If you do a task often in a game, it speeds up your game so much if you put it on keyboard.
Training units (and upgrading) is something you spend around 20-50 % of your clicks on, which means if you can do that 50% faster (keyboard is way faster than moving your mouse to the position) you have more “room” to spend the rest of your clicks on something other. Namely, microing those stupid culvs for example.
For example look at viper or hazza. They use hotkey for everything and keep the mouse mainly in the middle. You can look way more if you get used to the keyboard

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But not all top players have hotkeys for training units. I watch streams.
Especially because most of them play 1v1.

Also, for some people, mouse clicks can be faster than hotkeys in some situations. It depends from person to person.
For example, when people assign a group of military buildings (barracks for example) to the 6 key (when they are fighting multiple fronts in treaty). It’s often better to just click the floating icon on top of the screen than moving your finger to find the number 6.
There are more examples like that.

Pretty sure all serious aoe 2 and sc2 players are using keyboard hotkeys for the reasons i have described. AOE 3 is just not as apm heavy as the other games, so it s not that important. Still keyboards hotkeys are faster