Saturday, 5 March 2011

Learning Hotkeys and Shortcut Keys

To begin:
Hotkeys - The keys 1-9, 0, can be hotkeyed to a single building, or a maximum of twelve units by selecting the given object, holding down the control key (ctrl) and pressing one of the number keys. To be sure no one misunderstood that, I'm not talking about the num pad.

Shortcut Keys: Ever notice how when you hold your mouse over the icon to build a unit or building, there is always one letter in the name which is a differently colour? That's right, if you press that key then it's the same as mouse clicking the icon, accept faster by an incredible amount. This also goes for spells, commands, upgrades, and possibly a few other things I can't think of right now.

F keys: The keys F2, F3, F4 all hold a special purpose in starcraft, which I actually didn't learn about until quite a bit later in my starcraft career. It's a bit difficult to explain, but try it out and you'll see. If you hold down the shift key, then press one of the above F keys, then the position of the screen on the map will become hotkeyed to the corresponding key.

Alright, now that the definitions are out of the way, I'll explain why these things are important. By utilizing hotkeys, shortcut keys, and F keys efficiently, you'll be able to play a lightning fast speeds, which in turn will enable you to control your units better, create more units faster, and manage your economy with ease. Believe me, I've been through the denial that I can still be good at starcraft without utilizing these features, but the sooner you accept them as your friends, then you'll be a step further to become a great player. To anyone who disagrees with this statement, you are wrong and a terrible player. No one, and I mean no one out there who is/was a great starcraft player never uses these features.

I'm going to be honest, the following methods were utilized by me, and created by me from my own experience. There may very well be faster ways of getting used to using these features, but this is how I did it and it worked for me.

The shortcut keys are by far the easiest of the three methods to learn. Fortunately blizzard was nice enough to make most of the keys logical, so all you need to do is just make a concerted effort to use them in game. Just play a whole bunch of games and force yourself to use the keys rather than mouse clicking things. In a short period of time, it will become second nature.
*There is one acception to this rule which I'll mention later

The hotkeys in contrast take a very long time to set up properly. Although the hotkeys are incredibly useful, and at first you have no clue how you would ever use all of them, you'll soon learn that there is never enough. Part of the challenge in competitive starcraft is deciding what is most important to hotkey. Many players develope their own hotkey set ups, and I encourage you to do the same, however you must examine those created by others, lest you make some terrible decisions. In general the set ups will look something like
1 - Scout/units
2 - units
3 - units
4 - units
5 - nexus/hatchery/CC
6 - production building/hatchery
7 - production building/hatchery
8 - production building/hatchery
9 - production building/hatchery/comsat
0 - production building/hatchery/comsat

Before people start complaining and telling me these set ups are terrible, first stop qqing then realize that trying to make a hotkey diagram universal to all races is like trying to solve (sqrt(-1)/0). This will give you the idea, but nothing more, and until you start examining some set ups in broodwar chart, the diagram probably won't make much sense anyway. Download BWChart, download some replays, and use it to look at some hotkey set ups. Find one you like, and give it a shot, or try modifying it, but either way don't be stupid. I'll give you the set ups I use for each race (I play protoss primarily):
Protoss:
1 - scout probe/units
2 - units
3 - units
4 - building probe
5 - nexus
The rest are gateways. In mid-late game I'll usually reassign my nexus to an expansion nexus, and in very late game 5 and 6 may become units as well.

Zerg:
1 - scout drone/units
2 - units
3 - units
4 - units
Rest are hatcheries.

Terran:
1 - Command center
2 - Barracks/factory
3 - factory
4 - factory
rest are usually units

You'll notice that all of these set ups call for using the majority or close too of your hotkeys for buildings rather than units. This is due to the fact that you don't need all of your units hotkeyed all of the time, but you'll want to have as many production buildings as possible hotkeyed at all times.

To get used to one of these hotkey set ups, start small. To begin with, ALWAYS HOTKEY YOUR NEXUS/HATCHERY/COMMAND CENTER. Always have these buildings hotkeyed and unless you play Protoss, never mouse click your gatherers. The key here is simple repition, as with the shortcut keys.

A note for Protoss Players: Unfortunately we got saddled with a crappy shortcut key set up which makes it so that we need to decide whether to hotkey our nexus to one of the higher numbers, making pressing our d and z keys difficult, or assigning our nexus to one of the lower keys and mouse clicking to make probes a decent amount of the time. I use the latter approach, and it works great for me, decide what works for you.

To finish off this mouth full, we have the F keys. To be perfectly honest, I never was very good with these. Most authorities on strategy say that it is far more efficient to assign these keys to your expansions to defend against harass. This is correct, and the Korean progamers use this formula quite often. I always found that if I tried to use it then my expansions would not create adequate probes, especially during forge fast expansions. I ended up only using these keys for third, fourth, fifth etc. expansions. Yes, I give you the right to crap on me there, but I play better using this set up so I'll continue to use it (if I ever play again). Getting used to pressing these keys is very akward, so have fun and practice practice practice. Also note that some keyboards have an F-lock which turns these keys off, so take note if you have that too.

This ended up being an incredibly long post, and I'm quite tired so it may not be of great quality, but no one is paying me to do this so fuck off if you don't like it, and otherwise gl hf (good luck, have fun)
Rad301

3 comments:

  1. this blog has just what I've been searching for

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  2. those terran hotkeys are terrible, the standard layout is 1-6 hotkeys 8-0 scanners, you can hotkey your unitial buildings in the midgame but you dont usually hotkey more than 1 in the late game, you use F4 for production and 1 building hotkey to recall another production location.

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