I wish that when you’ve drag-selected a villager and a military unit that when you go to use the hotkeys to build something, that the contextual menu in lower-left corner has villager command icons in view (and their hotkeys read to be used) and not military formations.
Likewise – which is more often the case – when you select 5, 10, or 15 villagers and there happens to be one or two military units in that selection, then have the contextual menu defaults to villager icons.
A case could be made to make the contextual menu actually be for whichever is the greater amount in your selection (villagers vs. military units); with the tie going to villagers. And if this couldn’t be implemented, then just have it always default to the villager menu.
I just encounter it far too often that I select a bunch of idle villagers and try to do use the villager construction hotkeys, but nothing happens because there was one or two little military units in there that I either didn’t know were there, or it would be too painful to spend a bunch of time trying to find and de-select (or not grab in the first place) the military unit. And, currently, if you have even just one military unit, the contextual menu goes to military. This is highly undesirable UI behavior for me since I build things much more often than I use military formations.
Today, I had all these villagers selected, but couldn't build anything because there was a military unit in there somewhere, and that military unit over-rode my desire to have the villager construction menu/hotkeys available. It's like playing a mini-game of "Where's Waldo?" while trying to actually play Age of Empires...
^-- And here, I'm actually zoomed-*in* as far as I could to take the screenshot and it's impossible to see which one is the military unit in the heat of the moment. Normally, I'm on the farthest zoom out.
After the game finished, I can now see the military unit was the far-left icon, hiding under the "14" number. As if it wasn't hard enough to find him without that, lol.
Just so I know, though, is there actually a way to drag-select only villagers without it also grabbing military units?
In addition to my suggestion above, perhaps military units should get a different-colored verrry thin (hairline) perimeter or bottom-border on their icon (maybe an slightly de-saturated dark red or something)? Nothing gaudy.
I think this would be a good idea as well. Specifically for differentiating between monks, vils and other military. Since those 3 categories have their own hot keys.
And if possible to do it without creating too much conflict one could then differentiate between siege, melee and ranged mil
Not sure what you’re ralking about, if I have vills and military selected, the menu has both villager build and military formation buttons. And hotkeys for both work. You probably have some conflicting hotkeys…
Obviously having both working all the time is much better than just defaulting to one of them, depending on which unit you have more selected of.
I think I tried that, as well as trying Ctrl and Alt, but will double-check. But also, do you mean shift+drag select, or shift+doubleclick? Either way, i will try both. Maybe I used shift+dragselect and I should have shift+doubleclicked. Hopefully not the latter, which I think u mean, because I dont want a bunch of other (working) villagers in the vicinity to also be selected, which I think I’ve tested before and happens.
Hmm, yeah, this totally never happens for me. My construct hotkeys don’t work and the military formations menu appears. I will have to check later, but maybe it is because I use Age 2:HD hotkeys instead of DE ones?
Great evolved suggestion! Would be awesome to have such distinctions showing in the lomg list of icons.
Annnd group like-units together in that list, if possible, and if if they don’t already do that… so you don’t have to hunt for the 4 monks you have in a list of 50 units; they’d all be next to each other, with a thin hairline white color on their bottom border. (Part of me thinks this grouping already happens. But I don’t habe the game in front of me.)
Indeed HD hotkeys have conflicting hotkeys for eco buildings/aggressive stance and military buildings/defensive stance. I don’t know if DE hotkeys have conflicting hotkeys as well, you would hope that they don’t…
It is possible to select only villagers, it’s Alt+drag, military units is Ctrl+drag. Re-selecting using alt-drag is probably the fastest solution right now but it’s still annoying.
