Right now, you can have like 100 fabs with a single combat unit somewhere in there, and only the combat unit will be selected. Kindof annoying. And pretty much every unit has higher priority than factories. Ctrl could be used to force priority of selection to fabbers/commander. And alt could be to force priority to factories. I think this change would make economy management a little easier even in it's currently unfinished state. Alt-box select some factories, then s to stop! That still leaves shift to add more units by box selection like it does now.
Second suggestion while at it: Please evaluate circular selections as a replacement for rectangular ones. Drag starts at the center of the circle and goes out to the border. Refined version would add a filter popup at the END of the selection which can be triggered by holding a certain modifier key during the release event. Popup is placed right next to the cursor and only contains options based on what is in the selection. If mouse hits the border of the screen during drag, zoom out as the user probably wants to create a selection which is bigger than the current viewport. Drag is allowed in any direction beginning from the center. Why? Because unit-blobs tend to have just that shape and trying to find the precise starting point in the void to precisely cover a circular blob is a bit counterintuitive, while finding the center of a blob is an easy task for any human. Also means halved mouse movement for covering the same area and less false positives, where your selection already intersects with another blob of units.
I agree with the OP, and also with extterminans' extension. Circular selection will greatly reduce the amount of mouse movement necessary for an action that doesn't actually have relevanceto thee gae in and of itself. PS: I'm back
+1 for the OP, +1 for the selection idea however it should be optional or with some kind of modifier key rather than standard. for if you still have rectangular selection duties. (say factories or anything)
Great idea, being able to control whether or fabbers are selected or not would be most welcome. The idea of a circular selection instead of a rectangular one is also a good one, but I believe it should be optional; use a modifier key if you want a circular selection area, otherwise it is rectangular as normal.
I'm still amazed at the love this is getting Really hope uber implements something soon, especially with adding orbital units to the mix. Box selection based on zoom level, or something. It also makes me think that a smooth zoom right out to celestial will be annoying when dealing with orbital.............
Maybe this idea could be taken further, how about a button to hold down for fabbers, one for ground units and one for aircraft? Let's say you could hold down Alt to force selection to ground units - useful if you want to select all of your tanks in your base but you have lots of patrolling aircraft. Ontop of that you could hold down two of these keys to force a selection between two types of units. You could hold down Ctrl and Alt to force selection to fabbers and ground units - useful in an instance you need to move everything on the ground to another location.
A modifier to select certain unit types would be great. As someone said, selecting 20 fabbers and ending up selecting the one leveller sitting in the middle of them is annoying. Some UI buttons to filters for certain types of units/layers would be useful, as I do think the hotkeys are getting a bit crowded. Layer visible/invisible/show only this layer would be great to show only air units, or only combat units, or only vehicles etc.
