We Really Need a Way to Easily Select Units by Type

I LOVE the new patrol commands. They're amazing. I use it for scouting a planet as well as setting up a network of fighters above my base. Very useful for intel and fighting off incoming bombers.

However, having a swarm of fighters constantly covering the entire base means it's really difficult to select units on the ground layer. So there really needs to be a way to select units only of a certain type.

Probably something along the lines of select units by clicking and dragging while holding down a certain key and then you will only select air/naval/ground/fabbers/whatever.

This'll help us out a lot. Including it'll let us select fabbers that are hiding in a large group of combat units. And things like that.

This has been mentioned before on threads here and there but I haven't seen any dedicated discussion on this. I really want this to be noticed by Uber so we can get something that accomplishes this.

There are hot keys for selecting land /air units but I guess you want more control eg: select all those dox but not the slammers.

You can do this in hotbuild2. But it's not the same as you described here. But it should be trivial to code something like that.
Current System :
Select all units on screen. Then press hotkey where units are assigned.

Yeah little more help in this area would be nice. You can box around your base and use the bottom left icons to select which type you like in the meantime.

A nice little feature I like from TA was that I you grouped your air factories building fighters to 1. When you press 1 all the fighters would be selected. Would help me loads.

And that's how I currently do it, but it means every time I want to select a group of land units I have to cancel out the air units which makes giving move orders over twice as long – especially when lag is involved.

There are hotkeys, but that's for the entire planet. Not for selecting certain groups of units through the click and drag selection.

I really want something to be done by click and drag. So I can be precise in how I select units.

hotbuild will be our savior, just like it was for FA. at least I hope so.

I was always in favor of something like that. You wouldn't have to use it all the time, but it would be nice to have just a single key to cycle between orbital-only, ground-only, air-only, and after a few seconds it turns itself back off to prevent users from "not knowing why their game isn't working". It could be L, standing for Layer, by default, as I know that key is used by hotbuild2 but they are a mod so they could just change lol. No offence to them.

I fell like I'd rather just be able to assign a rally point control group. So that all units that get pumped out by a certain factory get added to the unit I want them in.

No reason to not have both though.

you mean, like CTRL-L to pick all land units, CTRL-A air units, CTRL-N to Naval Units from SupCom?

Not quite. Because we already have hotkeys like that. But that selects all units across the whole planet.

I want to be able to select only a certain type of units through the selection box.

Where I click and drag to select units and only select the ground units that are in my base.

Because I don't always want every unit that is on the planet.

There already exists a hotkey both to select all Land/Naval/Air units in existence.


There is also a command to restrict that only to units that are on screen.

Except I want selections.

I rarely select all units on the screen because I normally have units moving in all directions.

This is true. There are many hotkeys already however, and we are fast running out of keyboard.

Zooming in to select precise units is already implemented, as is a right click deselect/left click select.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it is a very specific contextual hotkey while you can tweak the existing system to achieve the same end.

I would also like to see something done about this.

How about something like this:

Dragging a box with LMB selects all combat units in the box while dragging a box with RMB selects all fabricators and commanders in the box (if possible, dragging MMB would select everything).

Then you can modify this selection by pressing ctrl, shift and alt or a combination.
Shift - Select only air units
Ctrl - Select only ground units
Alt - Select only naval units
Pressing a combination like for example Ctrl+shift would then select all air and ground, but not naval.

Then pressing ctrl-a would select all ground units on the planet, shoft-a woud do so for the air and alt-a would be naval. Additionally pressing ctrl+shift+alt+a would select all combat units on the planets.

How do you select all units on screen and then deselect only one kind from the pool? That's useful! But I can't do it

What about: Ctrl-L/A/S selects all the Land/Air/Sea units (on the planet, or on screen).
Holding L/A/S and dragging only selects the corresponding units in the bounding-box.
Or Dragging and while dragging pressing L/A/S once.

L, A and S are too far apart and since most (good) players use WASD to look around the planet I think my idea is better.

wtf who uses wasd? middle mouse > all.
Anyway isnt a feature like this in the queue for hotbuild2?

I'd imagine you can hold some key for any unit while selecting and only select those units. Maybe it would also make sense to define that i.e. X means "all land fighters", etc...

There is a key binding for "All Combat Units on Screen" (shift+f6 by default). Right click a unit on the selection display to remove it.

If you've got a mouse. I've got a trackball and drag scrolling is kind of awkward.