ESOCommunity

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 06:15**

I'm interested to hear how people manage their control groups. Currently I'm playing France and using number 1 for infantry (I just group musks and skirms together if I have both), 2 for handcav, 3 for anticav (just goons really) and 4 for artillery. Only situation where I've used a 5th is a group of pikes to siege shrines.

So how does everyone else configure theirs? How do you manage situations that might be common with certain civs like where you have different types of anticav (ranged cav and melee inf); split or group? Do you split musks and skirms? Do you split musks and longbows (or yumi)? Different groups for different sorts of handcav or just one big blob? Control groups for raiding cav or just rely on dragboxing them to avoid clutter? What do you do when you have more than 50 of a unit type? Does everyone use the number line or other parts of the keyboard? What civ do you find demands the largest variety of control groups? Do you ever group melee and ranged cav together (I found myself doing this when I tried sioux)? How do Chinese players do it??? I have many questions

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 06:31**

One for skirms, one for either pikes or goons, one for cav, and one for falcs.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 06:39**

I do the same as you man. Put skirm/ crossbow in control group 1, musk/pike man in control group 2. Huss in control group 3. If i have musk remaining when i reach fortress i put them in 1 with musk. Dragoons on 2 and hand cav on 3 artillery 4. I always have my extra scout(envoy, native) on 5. I have hotkeyed my explorer on r. So all age 1 i do r, t, 5. This is basically how i play france.
With china i do all range infantry 1 all melle infantry 2 and all cav 3. After age 1 i put desciples and explorer on group 2 as well. What i struggle against to do is to put different control group on cav which i splited to catch raids or to raid myself.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 06:55**

Looks like my main ones are very similar to those mentioned:

Anti-cav (pikes or goons)
Ranged infantry (bows, skirms, muskets)
Melee cavalry
Artillery, or flexible (e.g. raiding group or leftover pikes) if I don't have artillery
Primary military buildings (usually barracks)
Secondary military building type (stable, wonder, foundry)
Docks when on water, occasionally third military building type on land
Secondary scout (native, envoy, disciple)
Another secondary scout if I get one

I don't use a control group for my explorer, but a fixed separate hotkey.

I find it helpful to control group military buildings so I can quickly access them without moving the view and without having to cycle one by one. I also use "select all units of same type" a lot when I have homogenous groups, which makes it quite easy to add e.g. the latest batch of skirms to the skirm group without having to find and dragbox them.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 08:17**

1. Primary production facility
2. Secondary production facility
3. Town Center

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 08:29**

Mine are: 1 = anti-infantry (skirm or falcs); 2 = anticav; 3 = cav; 4 = Main prod. facility (usually rax); 5 = Secondary prod. facility (usually stable) 6 = docks. Sine I use 'WASD' for navigating the screen, the position of my hands allows me to only effectively reach number 5, so 6 for docks is kind of a struggle. The hardest civ to group for me is china. When I get brit cons musk, I don't have a perfect spot to group them. They don't fit into the skirm ctrl-group, as if you do this and a-move in skirm-wars, they will just run forth (due to a lack of range) and get picked off far too easily. If you have them grouped with pikes it's usually better, but also has it's disadvantages (e.g. slowing pikes down). And the worst part is when I send Manchus. I hate having goons with hand-cav, so what I usually resort to, is putting all my Inf into ctrl-group 1 (yes skirms, musk, pikes, hero all together xD), 2 for manchu & 3 for hand-cav. This however depends on how many units of each type I have. If there is tons of infantry-anti-cav, and only a bit of hand-cav, I will group Manchu with the cav.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 08:33**

1: Barrack(s)
2: Stable(s)
3: Art. foundry(s)
T: Town Center(s)

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 11:06**

None mostly. I deploy Somali tactics

[spoiler=spoiler]Although sometimes I use "1" for skirm-type units, "2" for anti-cav units, "3" for kavs, "4" for whatever the heck I decide then, mostly unit training facilities[/spoiler]

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 12:15**

I remapped control group 9 to ~

~ = cannons, raiders, daimyos, miscellaneous/scout, random split units, early game skirmishes I use this group to split my other groups a lot
1 = Heavy Infantry/Ranged Cavalry, secondary group for ranged infantry, the only units that almost never really end up in this group are melee cavalry unless I really need that many groups for them
2 = Ranged Infantry (Ranged inf is common enough that this group is almost never used for anything else)
3 = Melee Cavalry/Ranged Cavalry/Artillery

4 = Barracks
5 = Stable
6 = Artillery Foundry
7 = Misc (Don't use this one very often, but sometimes I use it for wood vills, scouts, warships, raids, etc.)
8 = Docks/Misc

So how does everyone else configure theirs? How do you manage situations that might be common with certain civs like where you have different types of anticav (ranged cav and melee inf); split or group? Do you split musks and skirms? Do you split musks and longbows (or yumi)? Different groups for different sorts of handcav or just one big blob? Control groups for raiding cav or just rely on dragboxing them to avoid clutter? What do you do when you have more than 50 of a unit type? Does everyone use the number line or other parts of the keyboard? What civ do you find demands the largest variety of control groups? Do you ever group melee and ranged cav together (I found myself doing this when I tried sioux)? How do Chinese players do it??? I have many questions

Usually 4 military groups is enough to avoid overlapping different types of units too much. I think there are times where a 5th would be nice, but it's hard to find room for it on the keyboard that is easily accessible when you need it to be without conflicting with something else. What I usually do in this situation is group some suboptimal units together (like musk/heavy inf) and then when a fight starts I will remove the musks from control groups altogether and just manually micro them for the rest of the fight. Unless I forget, which also sometimes happens

For the most part you want to keep different unit types separate as much as possible, but if you absolutely must group them together I think mixing goons/hand cav is probably the least hurtful because you'll want to manually micro your cavalry in most fights anyway (meaning you won't want use the control group very much in fights).

As for which civ is the most demanding in terms of control groups... probably China. Japan can be slightly annoying as well once you have both daimyos and artillery, Spain and India to a lesser extent sometimes have this problem as well.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 12:22**

Spain because of dogs/rods/skirm/canon/cav and China is the same except you don't have canons.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 12:24**

Except when you do have cannons as China of course

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 12:58**

Aizamk wrote:1. Primary production facility
2. Secondary production facility
3. Town Center

this but I just use the default find tc key

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 13:15**

India aswell if you make microable units

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 13:56**

the control groups become hard from number 5 i need to see my keyboard to access it,its harder to map a building on 5 6 7 8 9 ,any ideas to make it comfortable to fit on my left side? i have changed 5 6 7 to z x c respectively but still im not being comfortable ,not able to group units properly i use 1 for inf 2 for cav /vice versa group for falcs and other stuffs i miss need to control with my mouse which is annoying in micro battle any new ideas? i use a s d q w e r for other things soo..

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 13:58**

I would like somone posting their hotkey setup file here or put a new thread where pro players share their hotkeys it maybe work for some people and hence save time figuring out ur optimal setup ,its there in CS GO where pro players have shared their "crosshair" setup fail helped me in cs go maybe here as well :)

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 14:08**

q - explorer
w - select all idle vills
e - town center
r - drop villagers from tc
t - market
a - baracks
s - stable
d - arty
f - docks
g - select all idle fishing boats
y - attack move
b - bombard mode
n - running mode with falcs
1 - ranged inf
2 - heavy inf
3 - melee cav
4 - goon
5 - cannons

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 14:27**

Unlike most posters I don't put production facilities in a control group. I use "select all barracks/stable/foundry type" hotkeys mapped to my mouse.

I have poor keyboard dexterity, and I struggle with more than 3-4 control groups, which I use for units exclusively.

The exception is late game where you're not producing from your in base barracks any more but from forward facilities, where in control groups for units matters less than unit spam. But as primarily a 1v1 or 2v2 player this is pretty infrequent.

I will also map some units to control group 5+ just to get them out of the current control group 1-3, for raiding or seiging, but I won't control them with that group.

Edit: my setup: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe3/comments/ ... h=54cff77e

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 15:41**

[Armag] diarouga wrote:One for skirms, one for either pikes or goons, one for cav, and one for falcs.

I have about the same, what do you do with pikes when you have goons at the same time ? (Thinking of VC brit semi mostly)

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 15:52**

I either group goons with huss, leave pikes for raids or just ungroup pikes and manually move them

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 16:30**

Mitoe wrote:I remapped control group 9 to ~

Ah that's smarter than shifting all control groups to the left by 1 like I did. But I guess you have to deal with your "first" control group showing up all the way to the right on the screen.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 16:33**

It would be OP if there heynoard with some sort of number pad on the left. I think that would maybe make it viable to use all 9 control groups.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 18:42**

ovi12 wrote:It would be OP if there heynoard with some sort of number pad on the left. I think that would maybe make it viable to use all 9 control groups.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 18:54**

From 1 to 3
Find stable, find rax, find artillery foundry/agra - ctrl group 3
`(the one on top of the tab button) - select all of the same type
Q-raiding unit, w-light infantry, e-heavy infantry, r-falcs
A-hand cavalry, s-explo,d-ranged cavalry, f-2nd scout/explorer with tad civs
Z-skirm/goon training, x-bows, c-special hand cav/hand infantry, v- musk/huss/dopp/explo sharp attack/house building

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 19:04**

gibson wrote:
ovi12 wrote:It would be OP if there heynoard with some sort of number pad on the left. I think that would maybe make it viable to use all 9 control groups.

Unfortunately doesn't have the number pad on the left tho.

Posted: **15 Apr 2019, 19:14**

ovi12 wrote:It would be OP if there heynoard with some sort of number pad on the left. I think that would maybe make it viable to use all 9 control groups.

I use q w e r as my 6-9 ctrl groups. I rarely ever efficiently use like even 8 out of the 9 tho.

I have inf on 1 cab on 2 anti cab on 3. 4 is for finding agra fort.

Explorers on q/w later in the game on grp 1 with inf and q and w are raid groups. Herding vills on e, TCs on t. Having a ctrl group for tcs makes it easier to just click two keys t-v later on when u have 3 tcs.

R is for when I have 2 explorers and a scout. Or like an fb full or something.

For finding buildings I use x for all raxes, c for caravanserai, z for castles. Building construction is alt+the respective find key. Like alt+x for a rax. Queuing stuff is the asdf keys.

If I want to find a single building of any type I use ctrl+respective building. Useful when I fuck up a batch or some shit. Or when I need to find two separate rice paddies to get both upgrades going.

Having said all this, u should go for whatever setup u like cuz what matters is how comfortable you are with ur keys

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