I'm wondering how some of you more advanced zerg players take advantage of hotkeys, like maybe some tricks to save time.......I don't know. Let's have a discussion! When I'm on my one starting base, I have my hatchery on 4 and different fighting units/scouts on 1-3. This works fine as it is, but after I start expanding, especially in longer 1v1 games where I have 3 or more hatcheries on different mineral patches, I start having a really hard time macroing efficiently. Sometimes, in the late game, I'll have all of my hatcheries on 4, and I'll just morph units out of all of them at the same time and have them all go to the same rally point. This seems to help a lot, but there are still problems. Like, sometimes, I want to build out of one of the hatcheries, specifically, maybe because I want more drones at that mineral patch, and then I'll have to actually go to that hatchery (usually click to it on mini-map). I wish there was a way to, like, scroll between the hatcheries when you have them selected and know which was which right away. You know what I mean? Also, when I have one base, I go to the location of my hatchery by pressing 4 twice, but when I have multiple hatcheries, I can't do this. I think my screen just goes to the newest built hatchery. So, I used to spawn larvae this way. I'd select and go to the hatchery, then click on the queen and spawn larvae. But, when I had 3 or 4 bases, I couldn't do this, so I had to go to each hatchery using the mini-map and spawn larvae with each of those queens. And since I couldn't remember when I needed to spawn larvae when I have 4 different bases, I'd just keep going to each of them and checking. This takes WAY too long. Recently, I heard that a good way to do it is to have all of your queens on 5 and spawn larvae by holding shift and clicking on each hatchery on the mini-map; I'm trying to start doing that now, but it feels so.......weird. I think part of it is I just need more experience and APM. Eh, this is a pretty decent length already, so I'm just going to stop here. Suggestions, ideas, comments.
9 - all hatcheries 8 - all queens (spawn the way you described except for shift... just isn't comfortable yet) 7 - first ovie/scout seer 6 - second ovie/scout seer 0 - all my army 1 - flank A (learning this) 2 - flank B (learning this) 5 - harassing mutas I don't find spawning larvae time consuming as it's just a couple of clicks, and since I spawn at all my hatcheries at once, I don't need to check them individually... I start at my main and if it's already spawning I don't go on to expos, obviously. I just need to remember it. Though I wouldn't call myself an advanced player. Oh and about the drone thing, just rally all your hatcheries to a mineral patch at your newest expansion. You don't really lose by making some of your drones float a bit before getting to work.
Something that helps a lot of players is using backspace. Backspace rotates between your main buildings, in your case hatcheries, so you can for example select your queens, press V for larva inject, hold shift and hit backspace and click in the middle of the screen as many times as you have hatches for that. Also you can use backspace to rotate between hatcheries, but there's no way I know of to select a specific hatchery faster without binding it alone. One thing I do with my expansions is try to transfer a little more than half of my workers from my main to my expo, and then when I grab a third transfer half of my main's and ~1/2 of my natural's workers so that I maintain relatively homogenised mineral patches, and keep making workers from all my nexi(For example if you have 30 workers on the main(on minerals) when you make a natural and transfer 20 of them to the natural(6 on gas, 14 on minerals) you get 10 workers mining minerals on the main and 14 on the natural. Thus the natural having a better mining rate. If you decide to grab a 3rd when you have 20 on main and 24 on natural, and grab 10 from the main and 12 from the natural then you're left with 10 on the main, 12 on the natural and 22 on the new expo(6 on gas-16 on minerals) thus being able to mine of all 3 bases without mining any of them out soon enough and being able to produce workers on all 3 expos) With zerg it should work a little differently with larva, I think, but I find that helpful for having all of my nexi bound in 1 key both for cb convenience but for worker production convenience since no workers get wasted on mined out bases.
I use almost the same setup as butterbattle. 1-3 is army, 4 is all hatcheries, 5 is all queens, 6 is evolution chambers and spire, and 7 is nydus network. To spawn larva I hit 5, shift v, and click hatches on my minimap. I do have a similar problem to butterbattle, sometimes I don't want to produce units out of a certain hatchery. 1) I don't want to make ground units on my island base. 2) I don't want to make any unit at a hatchery that is being attacked by some massive enemy force that I can't handle yet. For the first case, I currently don't add an island hatch to a control group, instead I build drones there manually as butterbattle does. What I should do is set all island hatches to ctrl group 5 with the queens, I would have to tab between them but at least everything is hotkeyed, and I can make both drones and flying units at the island. In the second case I just remove the hatchery from ctrl group 4 before it dies. I also somewhat surprised at kuvasz' setup. You use all numbers up to 9 and 0? My fingers really don't want to move that far. Heck, I struggle just to build immortals since the "I" key is so far away.
Here in Hungary 0 comes before 1 And I'm not sure why I chose this setup. Bringing the groups to the left might improve my play but I'm fairly proficient with my current layout and I'd have to relearn the new one. But since I have hydras and mutas I would probably make 6 the last one instead of 5. So maybe 6 hatch 5 queen 4 ovie/seer 3 muta 2 flank 1 flank 0 army I'll have to try this tomorrow.
On hotkeys: Is there a way to customize them? I'd like to make "`" take backspace's place and rotate me through available bases for example but I can't change from within the game...
Also: is there a way to disable right-click grouping? You know, when you right click on a group it puts the selected units in there. I sometimes give my move commands too low on the screen and it completely messes my groups up.
Aw, I don't think that's intended to be customizable(only out of instinct, because who'd think of such a parameter? )... But I think that for both right click grouping and reassigning keys there should be something that could be done using the config notepad file, though I'm not at all sure about it or if it's true on how to do it...
Better to start using hotkeys from the get-go and get accustomed to lots of groups. How you set it up is entirely up to you, but you'll generally want to be able to quickly access any of the following: - Scouts - Production buildings (barracks, factories, starport/stargate, etc) - Main buildings (command center, nexus, hatchery/lair/hive) - Army (divided into various sub-groups so that you don't attack move your entire army and have the air get there much earlier and get decimated) -- Fast ground (hellion, lings, stalker) -- Slower ground (zealots, marines, infestors) -- Armoured ground (immortal, tanks, roaches) -- Air attack (mutas, vikings, void rays) -- Air support (medics, overlords/overseer, observers) So right there you have at least 4-6 groups, which is pretty close to what you're seeing in people's posts. Remember, it's much easier to use both your hands (hotkeys + mouse) than using the mouse alone. Hitting 1 twice to select and center on your main army when you're being attacked is much faster than having to find the threat on the minimap, click on the minimap, select your army and then attack. Tips such as when you have an army of multiple unit types and hitting Tab to cycle between their abilities will make you even more efficient.
