In my custom hotkeys, I used SHIFT+[letter] for selecting all buildings of a certain type. The existing shift-behavior when queueing units is that SHIFT+[unit hotkey/mouse click] queues five units when a building is selected. This used to work fine, for example: when nothing is selected, SHIFT+F selects all monastries, but when the stable is selected, SHIFT+F queues up 5 battle elephants. I could queue up batches of units without a problem, but since the december update it doesn’t work as expected anymore: when I select the stable and hit SHIFT+F, all monastries are selected instead of queueing five battle elephants.
This is similar to the problem I mentioned in another thread that when you have groups under keys 1 and 2, you currently cannot select two groups by hitting 1 followed by SHIFT+2, something that used to work in older versions of AOE2.
Devs, did you change something in the priority of handling hotkeys in the december update? How can we keep the intended SHIFT+[unit hotkey] for queueing batches of units and SHIFT+[group hotkey] to concatenate selections (while also using SHIFT+[letter] as game commands)?
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Agree, reported as a bug?
second problem:
You select 2, press shift 1 and thus add all members of 2 to 1.
Did the order get changed up? I honestly don’t remember if it ever was any different.
But what I described does work well enough, I believe.
[I don’t know how this ends up behaving if the addition would make group 1 go over 60 units]
first problem:
You use hotkey overloading like that by default?
So before when you are at the stable and would like to show all monasteries you’d have to click on empty space or use a different hotkey first. And you prefer that.
I suppose you’re one of very few people who’d do that, then.
[not saying that it’s a bad idea per se, just perhaps a very unusual one]
So yeah, I suppose the new update did screw you over.
Priority to unit-creation hotkeys is indeed the more sensible behaviour.
I still having haven’t wrapped my head around the concept yet, tbh.
I wasn’t sure whether it is really a bug or not, so I thought I ask it first in the normal forum section.
Hotkey overloading is useful to me, since I prefer keeping the right hand on the mouse, so the hotkeys I use must be decently reachable with the left hand without large hand movements. I don’t use all available hotkeys, but I use a grid-based system with some custom adjustment, so I have quite some hotkeys and then it makes sense to have overloading hotkeys.
Overloading of hotkeys is already part of the implemention since it’s no problem to assign A to creating an Militia, creating an Arbalest and a Scout Cavalry all at the same time since they belong to different groups. I also have ‘F’ for steppe lancer and battle elephant; they are in the same group, they occupy the same grid spot, but no civ has access to both, and this also works fine.
And indeed, for some hotkeys I need to unselect a building first before it works, I am fine with that. Regarding adding units to existing groups I am fine with assigning shortcuts that do not use the shift key, to free up shift for selection concatenation. I can imagine that hotkey overloading might not be available between ‘nothing selected’ and ‘one or more objects selected’.