There are a lot of little annoyances in PA relating to selecting units. Sending a bunch of units through a teleporter and trying to click the handful of fabbers in their midst so they can start building things, trying to click on a orbital fabber or advanced radar sat mixed in with a bunch of other orbital units, trying to select a row of factories and not the units they produced... the list goes on. So here's my suggestion: use hotkeys to toggle "selection filters" on and off. Some examples of filters might be "buildings only", "Land Units Only", "Orbital Units Only" and "Fabbers Only". Active selection filters would be visible in the UI (perhaps on the left side of the screen, right above where it shows what units you have selected?). While you have selection filters active, you can only select units (via click or drag select) that satisfy all the selection filters (so if you have "Orbital Units Only" and "Fabbers Only" active, you could only select orbital fabbers). As for which hotkeys to use, PA has a lot of spare "Alt+..." options, so hotkeys like Alt+F for "Fabbers only" would do nicely IMO. Think this would work?
I'd even go further and say let people configure their selection filters freely in a dedicated menu in the settings. You can define as many filters as you like and they can include whatever units you like. For example t1 tanks + t2 tanks or combat fabber bots + shellers.
I was definitely thinking about mentioning that too. It would probably require its own spot in the Settings tabs, like how Hotbuild does it, but I'd certainly enjoy having that kind of functionality as well.
I would like to be able to Press 1 at the same time as i am dragging to select fabbers, that could be helpfull. I'm not sure if Uber is going to ever add it, but till then there's a mod for that (no it's not, but someone needs to make it)
I'm looking at the Hotbuild2 post, and can't find anything about unit selection filters - can't see anything about it in the Settings tab either. Where should I be looking?
When you assign a hotkey to build a unit, that creates a selection filter as well. For example, I have a hotkey for all fabricators that is "z." So whenever I have a factory selected and I press z, the factory builds the fabricator. Whenever I have a bunch of unit selected and press z, only the fabricators are selected. You can make overlapping hotkeys or you can set unique hotkeys.
The problem is, a lot of the problems with selection involve not being able to get a selection including what you want in the first place. For instance, I have my ground factories using the "g" key in Hotbuild. If I select them with some other buildings, I can use "g" to get only my vehicle factories, but if I want to drag-select four vehicle factories in an area with a bunch of nearby units, I'm out of luck. If I were using my proposed selection filter, I could toggle the "buildings only" filter on, select the factories with a drag-select, and then (optionally) toggle the filter back off.
There's lots of propositions for selection filters. I've made quite a few suggestions myself on this topic. Improvements do need to be made, and will be made, eventually. Unfortunately, every suggestion will have one or two drawbacks. I was just letting you know what can be done in the meantime. You can also double click on factories to select all factories in the field of view.
Yea, the problem is we are really hitting the ceiling of what can be done with mouse and keyboard in an RTS... there are only so many practical combinations of keys and mouse commands. Additional UI elements are not really helping with this particular thing either, as doing things through the UI is often very slow, which is why we have thins as hotbuild in the first place. It's time for AI and voice commands
https://forums.uberent.com/posts/914091/ I'll just leave this here. Feel free to suggest additional features in the thread
