Specific unit selection, orbital unit selection

Orbital unit selection is a real chore right now. Just played my first real orbital game, me against 3 AI commanders in a FFA, on @elodea's 'Honeypot' system (nice system mate, thanks!). I've seen this mentioned a few times but a quick search didn't find a dedicated thread, so here we are.

Making orbital units fan out when launched/built from an orbital factory would be nice. The current overlap is awful. This brings me onto my next point, which is:

I think it would be good to have a feature/mod that let you map a keybind to select a specific unit. Either the nearest unit, or the nearest ten, or all of the units on that planet for instance. This would be useful to select, say, an advanced radar satellite out of a sea of avengers, or if you're micro'ing some dox on a raid, see an incoming army of dox, and you want to call in the nearest bomber to help out.

If any modder thinks this is possible right now, I'd be happy to try and make it happen myself. It would just need a separate menu in the UI, a list of all units, and the option to make a keybind for each one (not that you'd want to define all of them, i'm sure). But certain units, maybe? It could be broken down more simply to 'nearest air units' or whatever.

Just a thought anyway!

This already exists - you can keybind selection of on-screen land, sea and air units.

However, I'm pretty sure no button exists for orbital units, which is a big oversight!

This could be further enhanced by making sub selections of the different types (airfabber vs botfabber, radar vs avenger)

If you catch my meaning

I'm aware of those keybinds, but I'm talking about specific units. Yes if I needed air support I could select all air units but what if I just want one bomber? I don't want to pull all of my units out of their patrol paths/areas if it isn't necessary.

Select all orbital on and offscreen would be a useful keybind too, for sure.

I agree with the idea of implementing some combinations to select specific units like all t1 bombers or all hummingbirds on screen and such

You can select all the units then pick the type of unit you want from the group in the bottom left.

Does that help?

Nope!

It's a useful feature, don't get me wrong, but it is not what I am talking about in this thread.

You can double click selected factories to select all factories of that type (on screen?). Does it work for units?

You can do this, although it seems temperamental whether it wants to bug out or not. Set an area patrol from your orbital launcher or factory. Same goes with all the other factories. If you want to select specific type of unit quickly, you can box select them all and click the unit type you want on bottom left. Is that what you're after?

I'm not sure if the current api will let you do what it is i think you are meaning. That is, select only a specific number of units, or specific number of nearest units relative to cursor position or camera position.

You could try using group hotkeys to pre-set groups of air units available for you to respond with instead? I usually do this with bombers and hummingbirds for situations like you describe with the dox. Like, i'll set a patrol order out from my air factories, and from that pool of patrolling units I'll create a hot group. Dno if that helps..