I really want to use the F (function) hotkeys

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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I really like the idea of preset hotkeys like the F1 for all miltary buildings. If it works well I could be free from having to group those, saving me lots of time. However, there are some issues that really seem to work against me when I try to use this. It would be great if devs could look into this and try to make it work. Here are the issues I’m having:

  1. The way we can recruit units like this is kind of weird and the first suggestions we get before having to cycle through the idividual building groups seem even random to me. I find myself cycling through buildings all the time because the first suggestions are not the units or techs I want to build. It feels kind of needless to be having to do this because often there is lots of space left in the first suggestion box but it is kept empty for some reason.

  2. Another use of the F1 hotkey is to be able to quickly change the rallypoint for ALL my military buildings (even ones that aren’t done building yet) and for this I really like this feature. For example when I’m in the middle of an attack and feel like I have little time or when I’m getting attacked and need to change rallypoints fast. However, it is super annoying that my camera view changes when pressing the button. So maybe you can adjust this so that it only switches the camera view if you press it twice?

  3. Lastly, this all works great but only until I build a dock since the dock is included in this F1 button. I do understand that the dock is a military building too but it completely breaks my ability to set rallypoints out of the F1 button (because the rallypoint for my dock and all my future fishing ships are then set to some point meant for military land units). Would it be possible to exclude the dock from the F1 button?

Would love to get some response on this from devs and/or the community. Have others tried to use these function hotkeys and if yes, how did it work for you?

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There’s a setting that makes it change from auto jumping to f1 buildings/idle workers/scouts/etc. I can remember exactly where it is in setting but you change the drop down box to “select only”.

I do agree tho, I really wish they would let you order the buildings in the group, or at the very least always have a set order priority so you can muscle how many times to tab through.

2 Likes
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Thank you! I found the option to only select buildings instead of select + camera jump and it works perfectly :blush:

My points 1 and 3 are still problematic for me though.