Selection of a certain ship type

[mmoroz]

Might be useful to allow keyboard shortcuts that do the same as clicking on the icons on the right side of the planetary map: select all scouts, select all fighters, etc. In fact, it would be nice if there was a keyboard shortcut for any UI icon that I can click with a mouse.

[x4000]

Only problem is, that's a fairly infinite number of keys, which there simply aren't enough keys for, even with modifiers.  Right now there are a ton of different possible ships and ship classes, more than 50 classes and over 220 ships... and the expansions and future DLC are going to be increasing that dramatically.  I know a lot of other RTS games use hotkeys in that manner, and this came up once before a few months ago, but it's just unworkable with so much variety here.  In most other games there are relatively fewer classes of units (AoE has maybe 6-8 per civ, plus the few key working buildings, etc).

[mmoroz]

Ahh, I didn't think about that.


I don't have any good solution to that. The only idea, in case you ever plan to introduce something like this, is:

- decide on a sequence of 10-15 keys (e.g., S1, S2, ..., S0)
- assign them dynamically to ship types owned by the human player
- so scout, bomber, fighter, cruise will always be the S1, ..., S4, but the rest would be mapped into whatever ships the player actually owns this particular game
- player could hover over the icon to see the assignments

But yeah, maybe we just need to get used to the mouse.

[Echo35]

Or you could buy the horrendus slab of plastic and metal that is the Steel Series WoW Mouse. 15 Programmable buttons should do it  : http://www.steelseries.com/teaser_heaven/add_to_basket/wow

But in all seriousness, I myself find I want ships separated in a battle (For special ships like EtherJets and Parasites) so I have a bit of a trick. Put all the ships into one big control group. Click the button at the bottom of the screen next to the give button that shows specific ship types, click on the ones you want to seperate and the game will select them all. Then its just a matter of assigning them to their own control group. Then when the battle over, I just pick everything and put it back into one control group, and then on to the next planet.

[RCIX]

Or you could buy the horrendus slab of plastic and metal that is the Steel Series WoW Mouse. 15 Programmable buttons should do it  : http://www.steelseries.com/teaser_heaven/add_to_basket/wow.

I've actually seen one of those before. I pity the gamer that plays the game that can use all of those buttons (aside from this one of course, no offense)!

[x4000]

None taken.