Okay I am brand new to this game and am having trouble with figuring out ways to get things done faster... I recently found the Hot Key Shift to build different buildings in order as you place them and to patrol a selected region. My questions are: Is there any other Hot Keys? What are they? What do they do? Do you have any Tips for a NOOB? Good Luck Commanders and Happy Hunting <3 MidnightCommand
Go to the options menu and check out all the keybindings, every factory has keybindings, as does every fabricator. However it'd probably be a good idea to try out the hotbuild mod. The only advice I could give is never stop expanding- but that's old advice; doesn't apply anymore AFAIK. I'm a bit out of date on the balance. ^^;
Yup, there are. The next patch (due in three days) will contain a player guide explaining more of the control concepts for PA. But right now, if you go to [SETTINGS] -> [KEYBOARD], you'll see that there are loads and loads of hotkeys as squishypon3 just mentioned. Watching videos also helps a lot. See the Videos and Replays subforum.
Oh if something goes horribly wrong and the game keeps crashing or something upload your DxDiag to your thread when you ask about it.
Why is this in mod discussions? To answer your question, you can view all hotkeys by going to settings -> keyboard shortcuts (or something along those lines). For tutorials, I recommend going to pamatches.com and looking at the tutorials there along with taking a look at Elodea's cookie cutter builds.
Setting factories to repeat with the infinite queue (over on the right or you can use a hotkey), building military units, and then building a few fabricators ad-hoc, by pressing the ctrl key while queueing them up, is really useful. They build ASAP, with the queue resuming once the units added with ctrl are complete.
I would recommend checking out some of these. Also I would recommend hotbuild over the default hotkeys system. here is a wiki article on basic controls. This is a nice video on how to start. pamatches.com has a lot of good info. Lastly, @ZaphodX has a lot of good gameplay videos to watch.
That said, its more then possible to play the game with out all sorts of fancy hotkeys. Simple knowledge of camera controls and the use of the shift key to que up orders really is the basic control needed to support mouse functionality. I myself use only these controls when playing and find myself at the zaphod limit (the point where strategy and tactics become stronger then micromanagement) consistently against the AI and a small group of friends I play with. Hotkeys are useful in the nature where you can set up any configuration you what to support your own capability's, and will likely help you brake that final barrier into Platinum and Uber in the games ranked system, where the execution of ones strategy can be as effective as any battlefield tactic.
Finding useful hotkeys amongst that massive list is very difficult for a new player. Ones I recommend include: Ctrl-Z - select all units on screen matching selected type F - select idle fabbers K - pause construction of selected fabbers/factories L - loop (infinite) build on selected factories N - orientate North (if you don't have pole lock on) Shift 1, 2, 3 etc - store camera location Alt 1, 2, 3 etc - recall camera location Ctrl 1, 2, 3 - set control group. Very useful for linking teleporters or quick-selecting nukes. 1, 2, 3 etc - recall control group D - commander Ubercannon S - Stop. Mostly useful for killing a build queue in the middle of construction IMO Alt-C - select commander T - focus camera on selected unit and Track Delete - use this on your commander just before you win for an awesome victory dance
A bit of advice having being teaching a friend to play the last few days doing co-op games vs the AI. Don't take strategy hints from the normal level AI. They may beat you the first few games, but their build orders aren't great. The ones I saw built a few mex and some energy with their comm before factories, probably to intentionally give you some thinking time before they can start raiding. The comms also almost always walked away from the first mex they built, giving you a really easy target for early raiding. I've not played against the more difficult AIs recently (tend to play MP only), so I can't say for certain whether this behaviour is intentional to give you an advantage, but given the overall opinion of the AI's quality I would assume so.
Ctrl-M - free cam. Use middle mouse to move the view, WASD for movement and R/F for up/down. You can use shift to speed up the movement Ctrl-P - Useful if you like look at incomprehensible numbers. FUN FACT: Before optimisation it was not uncommon to see 15 million triangles being rendered. It's five times less than that or maybe even better.
