The problem

Most top players in faf use lots of hotkeys, as is the case with all rts games. However even though faf has tons of different possible hotkey binds you can use they end up being unusable for 1 simple reason: The lack of keys on your keyboard to assign hotkeys to. This is especially noticeable in faf because unlike other rts games there currently isn't (fully) a system in place to work around this issue.

Let me take Aoe2 (and sc2 to a lesser extent) as an example. Aoe2 has, just like faf, a lot of different hotkeys to work with. However In Aoe2 you have the ability to overload hotkeys which drastically improves the efficiency of using your keys to bind hotkeys to. You have a worker selected? Press D to make a stable. You have a stable selected? Press D to make a knight. You have a unit selected? Press D to make them go into defensive stance. Meanwhile on faf you assign D to dive your t1 subs and now the D-key is completely unusable for anything else.

Let me try to emphasize just how bad this is.

A UEF land fac has 20 possible units it can make. Just assigning hotkeys to those units already takes up every single letter key that's in a realistic range of your hand. You are somewhat spared by the current hotbuilding key binds that are currently available by being able to merge land/air/navy & build hotkeys together, but at this point you've only covered the basic hotkeys and already lost 20 keys. General unit commands like move, attack, patrol, stop, assist, reclaim, capture and repair need to be added too. Then you have tons of other often used hotkeys too like drop (from trans), OC, pause, repeat, launch tml, etc, etc. At this point i have only touched the more common hotkeys and haven't even begun assigning them for unit abilities, selection or other features.

The solution

As mentioned earlier there is already somewhat of a solution to this issue and that is the current hotkey combination list under hotbuilding. Although it isn't perfect, if it would be possible to add whatever combination of hotkeys to any button(s) you want it would already be a lot better than the current situation.

So what i'm envisioning is a mod with some sort of template that allows people that have no understanding of coding to easily adjust a few values to construct their own hotkey combination. For example You should be able to assign dive, drop, launch tml and enable/disable shields all to a single hotkey. What i think is most important is that there should be some sort of extensive instruction file in the mod for how to properly use it.

If anyone has a different idea or solution that's viable feel free to share it.

All in all the mod should allow of better competitive play since a better hotkey setup allows for more possibilities.

Isn't that kind of a useless statement? Old and/or experienced players are the only ones who are willing to run in an election like this.

Considering the amount of times i've seen "you're chasing away all the contributors!" in the last week i feel like i have to point out that developers are not the only contributors and i can't help but notice that most of the support ftx actually gets is from active contributors.

@myEmperor said in Why so gay thing exist?:

Would our game really be worse without this unit?

yes

Seems pretty toxic to me that you label everyone that disagrees with you as a racist and hate speech supporter

@Pearl12 said in Fire beetle balance suggestion:

They are intended to be used as a snipe unit,

no

How about u host non dual gap maps yourself

cool story

Mercies are a trash unit anyway. Extreme rng cancer because aa's are retarded. The ability to instakill full hp acus is insanely stupid too. With good micro you can survive 30 corsairs or 5 strats for some time, but you see 5 mercies come while ur aa is a bit behind or it randomly died and u cant do anything about it. Probably the worst unit design in the entire game.

Best idea in my mind to not make it bad is to make it have big aoe but little dmg and do damage over time. Groundfire infront of enemy army reinforcements to delay or dmg them. If you fire it in the middle of enemy army they can react and dodge damage because of damage over time so there is counterplay instead of "i hAVe aA". Also should have a human amount of hp and fuel.

im signing up to arrive an hour late again

don't ask me i'm not a mod

F for yudi

t3 fabs are generally better than t2 fabs. Even though they are (barely) less efficient generating mass, they take less space, don't die as easily and most importantly give way better adjacency bonusses.

in

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The guides you read are probably outdated since aeon t2 land isnt garbage anymore

You have to keep in mind that repair in faf works a lot different than in sc2 because reclaim exists. If you save a 10% hp ML and bring it back to your base instead of repairing it you can instead ctrl k it, reclaim it and rebuild a new one with a lot higher mass efficiency. In practice there is almost never a scenario where you repair for the efficiency right now. You mostly use it when you quickly need some extra hp on structures like when you're in danger of getting power sniped, but in such situations it does not matter whether the repair costs 25% or 200% of the original cost since you want to repair it anyway.

Ofcourse once you lower the repair cost some new scenario's might open up where you can use it but it is quite hard to properly balance it because different units will benefit a lot more from it. For example repairing a mega is 6,5 times as efficient as repairing a fatty. On some units, like on t1, a change like this will barely have an effect, but meanwhile for t3 navy it comes close to the threshold of making it viable to just repair your battleships.

Issues like this is why the repair cost was changed from 100% to 75% a few years ago and not any further. Yes we'd like it if repair was more viable in different scenario's and more commonly used, but balancing a core game mechanic like this is pretty tricky and will probably cost quite some time. Considering that there is already another feature (ctrl k) that mostly does the same job that people want repair to do and it applies to most scenario's the result was that repair isn't high on the priority list atm, especially since the balance team lacks manpower right now.

You mainly use them against armies. Then as raiding potential u can go for storaged mexes and clumps of engies, or t2 fabs if its late. Csn also go for reclaim patches. Big upside is that they dont leave behind reclaim so you literally cant donate mass in a raiding attempt.

Whats important to note for teamgame players is that acus and pds hardcounter them which results in them often not working on 10km maps with 8+ players

Is that why fullshare exists?

Idk why beetles are compared to mercies since they have an entirely different role right now. They are underused for sure, but i still think its simply because people do not how to use them because theyre trying to use them like the old beetle.

I overslept