Help! How to set hotkeys?

[miloslav]

Hello gentleman. I am hardcore AoC player for years but I got bored of it. I see there is some new pulse in AOEIII community and I was thinking about getting into game. I played a little bit back in 2012/2013 but only played like 200 games, reached lvl 26 (1800 ELO) and then left. Now I am thinking about getting into game again. I own vanilla only thou. Problem is that I do not know how to set my HKs. Better said I have no idea which are most important so I got a few questions. In AoC I have HKs set so most of the time I keep my hand on left side of keyboard, only less important are on the right side. In AOEIII I find it impossible to fit like this cuz there is a looot of them.

1. Do I need "go to building" HK? Is it better to keep military buildings under numbers (like military units)? In AoC I have "go to" HKs cuz there is no possibility to put three raxes under one number then queue one unit and it distribute to all raxes. In AOEIII this is possible so I do not know which is better. If I keep them on numbers, I have much less space for army groups.
2. Do you have HK for every unit in order to build it? Lets say: villager, musk, pike, xbow etc.? There is ton of units and it causes troubles to me.
3. Do you have HK to build buildings? (build buildings lol) I mean, do you manually click icon in UI or use HK for that?
4. Is there "Go back to work" button? In AoC I could ungarrsion buildings and villagers went back to work they did before I garrisoned them. In AOEIII I struggle with that because if I ungarrison them, they all go to gather point which completely mess whole economy and it is not worth to garrison them because it is too difficult to manage them back to their respective jobs (wood/gold/food).
5. Do you use any formations in AOEIII? If so, do you have HK for that?
6. Any other important stuff I need to get HK for?

Thanks in advance.

[musketeer925]

I'm not a great player but this is my setup:

2-3 use hotkeys for all. I use q,w,e, for the units in order they appear in buildings, q is crossbow at barracks and hussar at stable, villagers at TC. For buidling, top row q,w,e... are economic buildings (house, market, mill...) and middle row, a,s,d, are military (barracks, stable, artillery foundry...). Q is trading post at explorer. Same pattern everywhere pretty much.

I make a lot of use of the spacebar -- space is TC, ctrl+space is idle villager, shift+space is explorer.

4. You can use the town bell to call, then ring it again and they go back to work. If you manually garrisoned, you need to redistribute manually. I made F3 eject to do the easy garrison-eject maneuver instead of walking around TCs.

5. Formations are important (cover mode vs. normal probably the most I've seen used at high level) as well as sometime switch to melee with musk-type units. I don't use hotkeys for them but they would probably be more viable if I did (and easy to implement, again q,w,e, right across, maybe with ctrl. Wouldn't matter.

Although I think this seup may require the "Enable conflicts" toggle, which iirc is not available without the expansions.

[Goodspeed]

http://eso-community.net/thread/140/tad-guide-3

My hotkey setup is in there.

An important difference between AoC and this game is that micro is a bigger deal here with hard counters and the variety of different unit compositions. You should always have at least 3 groups reserved for your army, preferably 5. I personally don't use control groups for anything but my army.

[miloslav]

Wow! You wrote whole paper about AOE. xD

[Papist]

Fortunately, there are very few early units that annihilate everything in the game, except for abus guns.

[crjensen4]

This is a very good guide - thanks for writing this.
In the hotkey setup - where is the key for cheking the HP of the opponents units? - Seem to remember there was one that would allow you to see this
Thanks

[Goodspeed]

Thanks
Alt shows hitpoints, I think that's a setting you need to change somewhere in options.

[evilcheadar]

This is a very good guide - thanks for writing this.
In the hotkey setup - where is the key for cheking the HP of the opponents units? - Seem to remember there was one that would allow you to see this
Thanks

alt key will show hitpoints.

[yurashic]

Hello gentleman. I am hardcore AoC player for years but I got bored of it. I see there is some new pulse in AOEIII community and I was thinking about getting into game. I played a little bit back in 2012/2013 but only played like 200 games, reached lvl 26 (1800 ELO) and then left. Now I am thinking about getting into game again. I own vanilla only thou. Problem is that I do not know how to set my HKs. Better said I have no idea which are most important so I got a few questions. In AoC I have HKs set so most of the time I keep my hand on left side of keyboard, only less important are on the right side. In AOEIII I find it impossible to fit like this cuz there is a looot of them.

1. Do I need "go to building" HK? Is it better to keep military buildings under numbers (like military units)? In AoC I have "go to" HKs cuz there is no possibility to put three raxes under one number then queue one unit and it distribute to all raxes. In AOEIII this is possible so I do not know which is better. If I keep them on numbers, I have much less space for army groups.
2. Do you have HK for every unit in order to build it? Lets say: villager, musk, pike, xbow etc.? There is ton of units and it causes troubles to me.
3. Do you have HK to build buildings? (build buildings lol) I mean, do you manually click icon in UI or use HK for that?
4. Is there "Go back to work" button? In AoC I could ungarrsion buildings and villagers went back to work they did before I garrisoned them. In AOEIII I struggle with that because if I ungarrison them, they all go to gather point which completely mess whole economy and it is not worth to garrison them because it is too difficult to manage them back to their respective jobs (wood/gold/food).
5. Do you use any formations in AOEIII? If so, do you have HK for that?
6. Any other important stuff I need to get HK for?

Thanks in advance.

1. Some people use them, some do not. Decide what is better for yourself.
2. There are tons of them but they are very easy to remember, they almost always are the first letter of the name of the unit, like villager is v, musketeer is m.
3. Yes, if it is hard for you to use those forget about them for now.
4. If you ring the town bell and villagers go into the TC you can click it again and they will go back to work, but good players don''t use the town bell because you need to garrison only villagers in danger, not all at once.
5. Yes, go to settings and enable advanced unit formations. Usually you don''t use many formations so hotkeys for those are not very important, but you can remember if you like.

If you are new to the game I advice you to read the guide for new players in the left column and watch "tips and tricks" series on Interjection''s youtube channel.