I set all of my factories to infinite production and patrol before they even finish building, so they are never idle and neither are the units they make. This means that all the fabricators I get out of them are currently ignored by the idle fabricator switch, and wander around assisting random factories. This makes the button pretty useless, and instead I have to zoom in pretty far and try to pick fabs out of the mess of units. These fabricators that are on patrol are idle for all intents and purposes, and should be picked up as such in order to make construction and expansion more manageable. If I don't want to stop the assisting, I can deselect those I want to leave on patrol, but right now finding fabs in the mess of other units and building is a much larger issue. Also in my opinion this button should also pick up the commander.
I get your point however this isn't the best way to use fabricators- you see a fabricator uses several times *more energy* to do the same job as a factory. You make much more efficient use of your resources by building more factories, and using fabricators only for actually building stuff.... Also I don't include fabricators in my infinite queue builds any more as Uber added in the ability to priority queue *a single unit* on an infinite build factory by holding 'CTRL' when adding units. Any units added to the factory in such a way will only be made once, after which the factory continues with it's repeat build. Edit: Re the commander, there is a hot key specifically for him... 'c' I believe, though you have to be careful in team games as the shortcut selects *all commanders on your team*...
Commander key is alt-c now, and it's been changed so it only selects your commander. I think the problem in the OP could be solved by having one factory not set to patrol, and just Crtl-adding fabbers when needed. Although I would question the wisdom of setting all your factories to patrol anyway, having a few bunches of units is better for defence and also better for sending off raiding parties.
If you have each factory covering a small area with it's patrol you have bunches of units moving around but you don't have to completely micromanage your defense. I works very well for slowing attacks long enough to manually bring in reinforcements, whereas if they weren't patrolling you could be easily snuck up on. But as I said the problem is ANYTHING built by these factories, crtl built or not, goes on patrol and doesn't show as idle. The fact that having fabbers helping to build units is bad but is the default behavior if on patrol is itself also bad. If this is a bad thing, it should not be what they do on patrol. They should be restricted to repairs and should show up as idle.
I like putting a team of advanced fabbers on a smart patrol to assist stuff that needs to be priority, like building my cluster nukes and antinukes. Works pretty good, though they tend to spread their workload out evenly so everything finishes about the same time. That said, how about a key that shows us all patrol coverage? Actually the ability to select and see just units that meet certain criteria that we select ourselves might be more useful than just a specific "show fabbers on patrol" button.
you already have a key; shift (if you've set the options in the menu to show all commands, not just for selected units). Problem is, area patrols just merge since they're entirely the same colour and their borders aren't visible so you can only see where the factories send the units to BEGIN patrol, and can't always see the extent of the individual patrol areas, particularly if you have Scouts on global patrol ctrl-building your fabbers when you want them, then shift + select the area, then physically click fabbers from the bottom left Having fabbers as part of an infinite build is pretty pointless though
I also ctrl+queue my fab and try to pick them up as soon as ready. I would like a key to cycle through Fabricator from the closest to the furthest. No mather if they are bot.. air.. busy or idle.
It doesn't help that if you try to box select a group of units it will either select all fabbers or all but fabbers. I haven't figured out how it decides. But it makes finding fabbers inside a mess of other units even harder. I will very often be struggling to figure out where my fabbers are, as they get lost in icon soup. Having a bunch of optionally displayed selection boxes on the side like SupCom did would be handy too (also having things you need to manually operate like nuke silos, etc that can get buried under other units on such a bar would be a huge help).
I believe it decides based on which it finds more of at the time.If you select a group of 6 fabbers and 7 dox, you'll select the 7 dox for example.
One of my favorite Minecraft mods Ender IO ran into this problem, because it allowed bundling of all of its conduits in the same block. Its solution was to offer a tool that let you select which conduits were visible when you held its mod-specific wrench. If we had a tool for unit visibility in the same fashion here it'd be nice.
Make a square selection over ALL you unit then an other one holding CTRL and.. Boom you got all your fab ! What I do to be faster is : Quote___ from here. What I would love is several dedicated command to select my AA, SCOUT, Combat engineers.. Etc.. ++ an other one to cycle through the closest one from the screen to the Farthest.. In order to give them accurate order ONE by ONE. As a temporary fix (I hope ) to call back all unit of a X type I made several macro on my keyboard : - I select a scout or a spinner for exemple - Then add it to a # group - finaly press my macro key that execute ; #1..2..3 (Select the group assigned to the unit I want to call back) CTRL+Z to get them all (Azerty Here ) CTRL+#1..2..3 to add them all in the group. Now each time I want to call them I press my macro key and it get them all. Without having to look for them! It work very well ! /Quote___ Enjoy
