Currently, mouse drag can be used to select a group of units and then SHIFT+mouse drag can be used to add more units to the original selection. Another existing feature is assigning units to groups. In AoE2 versions before DE I sometimes moved an army consisting of multiple groups as one army by combining these features: hold SHIFT and click 1, 2, 3, … to select multiple groups at once and then you can move them easily so that they all move at the speed of the slowest unit. However, this doesn’t work in DE. With the default hotkeys, such commands would merge groups. I then changed the hotkeys so that SHIFT+number is not binded to a command, but now the command does nothing.
So my suggestion is: make it possible to select multiple groups at once by holding the shift key while pressing the hotkeys for selecting groups. I think this should be default behavior without the need for a hotkey, since this is also the built-in behavior when holding shift while clicking or dragging the mouse.
Agreed. In HD I used to add units to different hotkeyed groups and quickly select them together for moving across the map using shift. In DE I can’t do that anymore due to this annoying merge feature, which I never use.
I second this. Sometimes the new way is handy, but I do miss being able to quickly select multiple armies, without having them all merge under a single hotkey.
For me, it is basically a muscle memory when I want to add units to a group, I select shift + group number, immediately followed by ctrl + group number. I guess that just did make more sense.
Would be great if we could choose between these systems
Yeah, I feel a bit cheated. They promised that all features from HD would be in DE, and currently there seems to be no way to select multiple groups despite that being really useful for my micro.
I saw it’s in the update, great! However, I tried it out in the scenario editor but it doesn’t work there. I created a very simple scenario and it doesn’t work when testing a basic custom scenario and it also doesn’t work when playing scenario in standard game mode. As long as the shift key is pressed, nothing happens when clicking a select control group hotkey. By the way, the top bar is bugged as well: the images for the resources are missing and all the buttons like objectives and menu also don’t show, though they still trigger when clicking where they should be.
Maybe it’s just a scenario editor bug or maybe the first launch of the game after updating doesn’t work properly. TheViper also had some weird menu bugs when launching the first time in his March update video. I don’t have the time today, have to check later to see whether it works or not.
I tested it and it works great. You have to disable “Shift Group Appending” in game options.
Interface (UI) bugs can be fixed by disabling UI mods and restarting game. Some UI mods don’t work properly after game update and need to be updated by authors before can be used. This is not related to shift-appending issue at all.
Did you clear the “Append Group x” Hotkeys? I had cleare them before the update was rolled out as they were useless to me at that time. It seems that now you have to activate them (e.g. put them on shift x) while leaving shift append groups unticked in the options
Yes, I disabled “Shift Group Appending”. I had the append group hotkeys on CTRL+ALT+# and I expected the shift-behavior to work out of the box and having the append group hotkeys still work for appending to the group. Apparently they decided you can have only one of the two; indeed you need to override all the “Append Group #” hotkeys with SHIFT+# to get the intended behavior. It’s not as optimal as envisioned, but at least we can do the same as in earlier versions of AOE2: use SHIFT+# to append the selection and then just redefine the group using CTRL+#.
