Hotkeys

Age of Mythology: Retold Discussion
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Hotkey & UI settings and design from an experienced game developer and RTS enjoyer.

Select All Building Hotkeys: Currently there are only Find All Building hotkeys. Since it’s “Find” and not “Select”, double-tapping the key does not move the camera to the building location…
This forces the player to either use control groups for buildings instead (since they work properly), or constantly use the “Find Selection” hotkey, which is frustrating.

Disable System Macros: Options to disable combinations such as alt+F4, the Win key, Shift+Tab, etc.

Camera Location Hotkeys: Self-explanatory. Very easy to implement; Some players just love using them.

Build Button: A single build (buildings) button would remove a lot of inconsistencies.
For example, a Norse army consisting of Giants will have the “Combat Commands” toggled, but once you add a single military unit to the group, the grid will switch back to “Normal Commands”. Inconsistent and very frustrating. We can have “Combat Commands” enabled by default, and a button that activates the building grid state.

Grid Hotkeys: Single static hotkey bound for each grid position. Right now it kinda works like it, but it’s very hacky, as you must specify each hotkey of every unit/building. A proper implementation would require only the 24 static hotkeys (one for each box in the grid), without needing to do additional work for every unit. StarCraft 2 has a great implementation.

Moving Grid: Would be really nice to be able to move the grid boxes to different positions. The default ones are arbitrary and may not suit the player.

3 Likes
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Agree with you on the select all building. I wish it actually moved the camera to the building you selected. I use ‘select building’ and just multiple tap to go to different locations. Not ideal but it works ok.

My hotkey revisions so far:

‘idle villager’ is tilda. ‘All Idle Villagers’ is shift tilda.

Temple is ‘T’. Market is ‘M’. Town Center is ‘H’. Last notification is F5.

Why can’t they have someone spend a day and come up with hotkeys that make sense like that instead of ‘shift-control-alt-s’?

I’ve been using ‘alt-,’ ‘alt-.’, and alt-/ for my Soldiers, Archers, Horsemen (or equivalents) forever. It’s second nature to me now.

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Given your examples, I would argue that modifiers like “shift-control-alt-s” are still better than something like ‘M’ or ‘/’. Optimizing for higher APM involves not having to move your hand as much.

But still, the best design is to let the player decide for himself, for each his own, and to make it as configurable as possible.

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It would also be nice to have the possibility to set ‘find archery range’ and ‘find monument’ to different hotkeys. Not sure why the devs grouped some buildings that way.