[Anonymous Player]

I have recently started playing this game and I am finding it challenging to remember all the hotkeys.

It’s my first time playing an RTS game and I don’t plan on playing it competitively in multiplayer mode.

My current focus is to have fun while battling with AI opponents.

[supervoegli]

i highly recommend not learning individual hotkeys from the start, but switch to the “grid” hotley layout.

that means: the order of hotkeys on your keyboard directly matches the order of the symbols on screen

for example:
create hussar/paladin/camel – Q/W/E

that way you dont have to learn *any* hotkeys at all, you can just “press what you see”, which simplifies things immensely.

once you got them down, you can look for small optimizations, like remapping certain keys you need more or less often to your own liking.

but as a start, i dont think theres a better way than grid.

[DriverEither]

I think the most important ones are:
Select all Towncenters, Produce Villager, Build House, Build Farm

You might want to get used to using the select all stables/ranges/barracks hotkeys and the production hotkeys for these too.

Obviously you can and should add more later on.

Or you can try to do almost everything with hotkeys from the start – you will be slower first but will get faster very very soon and won’t have to unlearn clicking everything.

But thats your choice.

[asupposeawould]

Town centre for villies and the idil vill button I crtl 1 my scout and QQ alot for houses still learning the Qweasd buttons but start small till it’s easier to use than trying to explain lol

[SCCH28]

Some hints: in each buildings and unit menus the hotkeys are mapped directly to your keyboard.

This means that the first option will be q, the second will be w, the third will be e etc.

Try that out: the barracks will produce a militia with q, a villager will build a house with q.

Those are easy to learn and intuitive.

No need to remember anything.

Out of the menus there are indeed many hotkeys.

A few important ones are select idle villager (default is .), select town center (default is h).

This allows you to spam produce villagers with h q q and put your villagers to work by pressing . (which will select villagers not working).

Space will move you to the last alarm, so if someone attacks you for example you can press space and see directly what’s going on.

You can personalize your hotkeys to your liking but that’s probably a second step.

For example for me h selects all town centers, not just one.

But it’s a good start.

[SFalco16]

H – go to town center, . (period) – select idle villager, shift+. – select all idle vills.

those 3 have helped me a lot early on.

plus what others have mentioned already with the “grid hotkey layout”

[Relyt1]

On this same note, when building I find myself accidently starting with the wrong menu, pressing Q instead of W to be in the military buildings page.

Is there a faster way to get back to the choosing civ buildings or military buildings?

Right now I’m just pressing (q,w,e) in the wrong menu to select any building and right clicking to clear the selection to get back.

[e4957]

F3

[Unholy_Lilith]

If you don’t use any hotkeys so far, start with the default ones and learn only a few at a time.

For starting out, hotkeys you need from the first second on are good ones.

– Select all towncenters (I use a custom one for that)
– Queue villager
– Build house/lumbercamp/mill/farm/mining camp
– Select idle villager
– Build hotkeys in general
– control groups
are the ones you wanna start out.

After you get used to them, add more.

Don’t forget shift, that way you can for example build multiple buildings of the same type or queue 5 units with one button.

Select building x, select all build x (for military production), (queue unit x [after select all building x]), select all idle military, select all military on screen are also good ones to add earlier.

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