Selection hotkey love and polish

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by Engineer1234, July 26, 2014.

  1. Engineer1234

    Engineer1234 Well-Known Member

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    TLDR: A post about selection hotkeys with praise but also suggestions for improvement and polish.
    (updated to reflect improvements in current build 71729)

    We have these hotkey options for selecting units and factories to make our lives and games easier.
    I use these hotkeys a LOT and I think they are great just like all the other macro oriented command & control features, like area commands ( now mandatory for any future RTS )
    Managing a battle across multiple planets is made not just doable but user friendly.
    While great, I think these selection options could actually be damn near perfect with a bit of polish.

    These are the options that currently exist and their behaviors when not self-explanatory, I might have missed some I rarely use:

    - Select all air combat units on screen
    - Select all air combat units (on current planet)

    - Select all land combat units on screen (fails to select AA vehicle)
    - Select all land combat units (on current planet) (fails to select AA vehicle)

    - Select all naval combat units on screen
    - Select all naval combat units (on current planet)

    - Select all types of combat units on screen ( does not include orbital )
    - Select all types of combat units (on current planet) ( does not include orbital )

    - Select all idle fabbers on screen
    - Select all factories on screen
    - Select all factories (on current planet) ( very useful for pausing them if you need energy NOW )
    - Select idle factories on screen
    - Select all idle factories (in the solar system)
    - Select all commanders (in the solar system) ( you can have multiple under your control in a shared army game )

    All of these controls can be bound to any key or combination of keys which is great ! I use F1-F12 + ctrl and shift combo's.
    The options that select factories include nukes, anti nukes, and halleys, I don't think including halleys makes sense since they have no resource consumption and don't produce anything.
    None of these controls actually say "on current planet" in the options menu, they just say "all".

    The "all" options used to select everything in the solar system, this was flipped and now they select stuff on the current planet which is surely an improvement.
    The option for selecting all the things in the solar system had it's own usefulness though.

    There are a number of selection options I think could be added to complete the control scheme and enable more macro awesomeness:

    - Select all orbital combat units on screen
    - Select all orbital combat units on current planet
    - Select all orbital combat units in the solar system

    - Select all types of combat units in the solar system
    - Select all land combat units in the solar system
    - Select all air combat units in the solar system
    - Select all naval combat units in the solar system

    - Select all factories in the solar system
    - Select all idle factories in the solar system
    - Select all idle fabbers on the current planet
    - Select all idle fabbers in the solar system

    - Select all commanders on screen ( if you ever find yourself controlling 20 commanders across 7 planets you'll want this hotkey )
    - Select all commanders on current planet ( all commanders please move through the teleporter, impending planet smash ! )

    - Select all nuclear missile launchers in the solar system ( nukes are interplanetary anyway )
    - Select all halleys in the solar system
    - Something that selects teleporters or combinations of teleporters might be useful, suggestions ?

    Thoughts ? (ohgodlongpost)
    Last edited: September 6, 2014
    hahapants, mazar83, corteks and 2 others like this.
  2. damnhippie

    damnhippie Active Member

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    Yes, that would be very nice. However why would you want to select Halleys?
  3. Engineer1234

    Engineer1234 Well-Known Member

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    Future proofing, if capturing units or structures from the enemy ever becomes possible then you might end up in a situation where you really want to selfdestruct your 3 halleys before the enemy throws a moon at you, that you paid for :)
    Mass selfdestruct has it's purposes.

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