Ive thought of a really good way of making life easier.

Is it possible to group units by their position in the factory setout.
Example:
24fbc0b9-0ce6-43cb-b665-28da9edb4e7c-image.png
@Emperor_Penguin made a mod more hotkey layouts.
So the idea is to change hotkey layout when you select a factory and use simple combination of whatever keys you'd prefer and you could save a lot of keys for other stuff by not letting the intersect by using more hotkey layouts mod. So that the result would be as in example.
Example:
5eec801f-4213-4074-86c3-0c0c46072453-image.png cc2aa761-8bdd-4bdc-b776-d89ee3aea25c-image.png
«Finally some good fucking hotkeys» © Gordon Ramsay

Kind of like age of empires grid hotkey layout

Never Fear, A Geek is Here!

I saw this layout in many strategy games in the last years, it makes life so much easier. Fast to learn and easy to use.

This is more suited for a UI mod, once that is fleshed out then I'd happily integrate it 🙂

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@yellownoob
I believe doing something like automatically changing your active hotkey layout based on what you select should be possible with a little coding.

pfp credit to gieb

@penguin_ that is not the hardest thing. We should focus on thinking of a decent way to do the actual hotkey layout that could properly connect the each faction and each tech of each factory.

Here is my idea

hotkeys.png

Never Fear, A Geek is Here!

I think the columns should be independent of one another, e.g., if you have an hq air factory it shouldn't take the hotkey of the extractor.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

I believe there is a hotkey for upgrade.

Guys, you do realise that there can't be any overlap between techs right? You can't have a titan and a mechmarine on the same hotkey since you can build both with the same factory. The current hotkey layout, besides few weird key choices like mass fabs, is already quite optimised and intuitive as each row of qaz corresponds to one tech tier

@tagada you are actually wrong. There already is a solution for that.
once you press key you get a selection window and you are at the first possibly buildable unit if you press it again you are at the second possibly buildadble unit and so on.

Ah forgot that existed, well that may be fine for most players then

@thecore I would recomend using hotkey for upgrade instead of yousing q w for hq and support factories. As it will do hq if you dont have one and will do support one if hq already exists.
Also there are currently no hotkeys for upgrades on acu. #At least i dont know of them.

How could u use the multi unit hotkey when its a factory. Rn it only works on buildings cus with buildings u click to show u have selected the correct unit. With factories there is no why to know if u wanted choice 1 or 2.

@SpikeyNoob you actually q by pressing lmb in the required quantities and the give the rally point by rmb which is also the trigger to close the selection window.

That seems slower than the current solution. Whst about queueing large amounts of units. If click the key too fast before the mouse button u will end up with wrong units. Also if the unit i want is the 3rd option and i want 4 units, thats 12 key presses and 4 mouse presses compared to the 4 using the current system. At that point just use normal clicking of the icon.

@spikeynoob The input sequence would be for example q q shift+lmb w lmb s lmb d d lmb k lmb
Its not that hard tbf

Good point with shift. Why are there no lmb after w and s?

@spikeynoob current solution require a shit load of keys being used. The choice is up to you to either memorise 150 keys or use 20 keys with a bit slower input (the actual input timings shouldnt be THAT much slower as you describe id say its 1-5 seconds at most)

@spikeynoob Actually on a second thought we should add a priority so that the higher tech unit comes before its lesser tech unit predecessor in the selection window. Thanks for noticing. So that later in a game would save you from pressing the same key few times.