Helpful Key Shortcuts

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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So there’s been a lot of good feedback after the stress test on how to add to and improve the control scheme for the game. There are a lot of key shortcuts that aren’t immediately intuitive or obvious so I thought to create a post collecting them. Feel free to add more, these are just a few I know of so far…

  • Build farms quickly: Shift + Farm icon (or hotkey) + left click over a mill, town centre (or even an existing farm) to rapidly spread them.
  • Select all units of a type: double-click a single unit to select all units of its type on screen
  • Remove a control group: control groups don’t get overwritten in AOE IV (a little annoying personally) so this makes updating or putting them to new uses a little frustrating. Ctrl + the # key you want freed up while having nothing selected will decommission that control group so you can use it fresh for something else.
  • Quickly cue up units from a building: for late-game production spam - hold down the hotkey for the unit construction and it will instantly cue up a lot for as long as you hold the key - not very precise but does the job - or Ctrl + build unit hotkey cues up 5 at a time.
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I hope control grps will get overwritten like other RTS :pray:

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Hope so too, the amount of times I had to manually clear a ctrl group was annoying…

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It isn’t that control groups don’t get overwritten, it is that units can be in multiple control groups at once.

  • Shift + # key will add a unit to a control group (if the control group doesn’t exist, it will create the control group)
  • Ctrl + # key will set the control group to all the units currently selected.

So for example, if a horseman is in control group 1 and 3 and I select an archer and do Ctrl + 3 key, it will have that archer become control group 3, while that horseman will no longer be in control group 3.

But if I do Shift + 3 key on the archer, the horseman and the archer will be in control group 3, even if I do not have the horseman selected. And the horseman will still also be in control group 1.

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I’ll have to play around again and test it out when the game releases - from your first example, will the horseman no longer be in 3 because it has 1 to fall back on? Because otherwise, it would just be a straight overwrite, which is what most RTS do and I was positive that wasn’t the case in AOE IV.

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Yes the horseman will still be in group 1 in the first example. Even if the horseman was not in group 1 anymore, it wouldn’t be in group 3 anymore, it would just be groupless.

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aoe4 should have camera location and fully customizable hotkeys.