5) A key to force move a unit in combat. Currently, if you know a high initiative unit of yours is going to vacate a space, it's really tough to give a lower initiative unit a move order to the space that's just being vacated. Not impossible (I've managed it myself, on occasion), but you have to try all sorts of clicks before the move order 'sticks'.

Omg... if this was done you would be my hero. xD

If I ever made a playthough video it would be accompanied by a lot of frantic clicking on the edge of tiles during battles to do exactly this!



2,3, and the 'EDIT' or are also huge ones to me.

These new hotkeys are such a huge quality of life boost - thank you, Matthieu! The 'force move' [Alt]-click for combat isn't technically a hotkey, but it alone is a massive move forward for the game :-)

The FDISI hot key is too cool! Thank you AmpliMath! And I noticed the hot key for the Empire Status screen has been moved from F9 to F10.

As usual, Matthieu, you show the true meaning of agile development. Thank you for loving the fan base - it restores our faith in the world!

AmpliMath wrote:
Folks,



I have finished implementing the listed shortcuts. Up/down browsing of cities / armies was a real ♥♥♥♥♥ as these list are sorted by filters. I added a new shortcut to cycle through all armies (V key), the idle armies scheme remains. I just read the left/right to check subsection in a city line, but that came a bit late



On his side, Thortillas has also implemented the forced move action in battle, which you perform with a left click with Alt pressed, when selecting a destination for a selected unit.



I am not sure when you will get these features, as it must go through QA to make sure I did not break everything. When the time is right, we will deliver it in a patch, as well as a recap of all shortcuts.



Cheers,

Very cool, and an update to the community feedback thread at the bottom of the stickier list on this page.. and we're set. That baby hasn't had any love in 6 months.

Folks,



I have finished implementing the listed shortcuts. Up/down browsing of cities / armies was a real ♥♥♥♥♥ as these list are sorted by filters. I added a new shortcut to cycle through all armies (V key), the idle armies scheme remains. I just read the left/right to check subsection in a city line, but that came a bit late



On his side, Thortillas has also implemented the forced move action in battle, which you perform with a left click with Alt pressed, when selecting a destination for a selected unit.



I am not sure when you will get these features, as it must go through QA to make sure I did not break everything. When the time is right, we will deliver it in a patch, as well as a recap of all shortcuts.



Cheers,

AmpliMath wrote:
2/ Cycle through all armies : do you think the current space binding is not useful? So I could replace the current behaviour of the space key with the one you want? Otherwise I can add a new key. I know from the past that people are happy when you change something they got used to.

It seems like there are two camps on this one: on the one hand it's nice to be able to cycle and not see units that aren't active for a reason, but during a war it's useful to be able to run through all your military and just double check you haven't forgotten a scout or garrisoned unit that could be fighting and is instead just sitting around. It's a bigger issue on big maps and long games, where the wars can get more spread out (especially if you're at war with more than one faction). So while the space activity is useful, the ability to straight up cycle all armies and garrisons (where there isn't just militia) would be a godsend too.

AmpliMath wrote:
3/ Navigation in army/city list : I can understand it for armies, as selecting an army will display its contained units. Could map it to up/down arrow keys. I do not understand the usage for the city list though, as selecting one does not really do much. It is the selection of the subsection for construction, garrison, or population which is more interesting. Or do you mean that navigating the city list should activate one of these options by default?

I think that's what I saw people saying over on Steam. The idea being that you click the function key to get to the city list then up/down arrow to get to the city, and left/right arrow to cycle the subsections I guess.

AmpliMath wrote:
5/ Force move on a hex about to be vacated : implementing a shortcut is not hard in itself, but it is the battle code which is. I have talked to Thortillas and it seems complex, but he will look into it.

Thinking about the logic flow, the only issue is how a unit deals with it if that hex (for whatever reason) fails to become vacant when the unit is due to move there. Does the unit try to advance by a different route, retreat by a different route, hold position (depending on stance)? Then there's the actual interface implementation - when you right-click on a hex which has a unit, the default behaviour right now either attacks (enemy) or supports (ally) or does nothing (where support isn't an option on an ally). Perhaps if you control-right-click as the first thing for a unit it knows to attempt a force move into that hex, then you still have the option to control-right-click as a second part to add an attack or support action.



Programming the code... well, you know what's hard better than anyone :-) Since this is a real big one for many people though, it seems, we appreciate you taking the time to look into it.

AmpliMath wrote:
6/ Main enter key to end the turn (please note you have overspent your credit of 5 wishes ) : it is tricky because people are now used to pressing this to start chatting. And you find the same scheme in plenty games. How about Ctrl+Enter to end the turn? Enter would remain to start the chat, and the key pad enter would still end the turn as before.

I don't personally have this problem (I have a full keyboard on my laptop) but it seems to me that would work pretty well. Just my 2 cents, for what it's worth.

I see the main limitation of hotkeys being a key driver of the game is a lack of UI elements to support them. It might be nice to be able to have your armies bound to 1 through 9 (automatically, though also re~orderable); but you'd need the UI to support it (with a list of armies, and potentially cities in a display card).



I agree for the unit scrolling that sieging units should be included, but I'd still want units in the defensive/passive/relax(?) stance to be omitted. E.g. I'll often have a scout perched on a ridge to watch for boats, but I don't need to move him every turn ; Understand that change sucks, but Tab would have been a more natural choice for this.



In the long term I'd like to be able to grab a couple of SCVs, define them as a control group so that at a later time I can rapidly build two refineries by hitting "B" then "Shift-R"... wait... no... that's Starcraft 2..

Genuinely impressed by this 'community engagement', how refreshing to have the CEO of a studio come onto the forums and answer requests!



F for FIDS, N for notification and Ctrl+Enter for end turn sounds good.



2) Army cycling - space to cycle through all units with remaining movement points sounds like a sensible change. It would solve the issue of forgetting about an army sieging an enemy city! If you're changing this anyway, please could you also make the cycling order not reset? i.e., if I cycle though a number of units, then do something else such as click on a city, space will resume cycling from the next unit rather than restart again.



3) I believe Titan is referring to scrolling the cities list (F2) and armies list (F6). Just tested and my mouse scroll wheel works fine in both of these (Logitech M510 mouse, using default 'HID-compliant mouse' driver auto-installed by windows). Up and down arrows would seem a sensible alternative for anyone having problems though. Extending the same controls to scroll horizontally through your heroes (F5) would also be handy.



5) Would be extremely useful for combat, particularly for units that heal units next to them. I thought that request was a bit beyond the scope of asking for keyboard shortcuts, but happy to see your response!

Titan wrote:
Thank you, Matthieu - that's a very generous offer. Looking around the fan base online, the keys that people are requesting most are:



1) FIDSI on/off toggle, so you don't have to put your mouse into the bottom right hand corner of the screen.



2) Having a key which consistently cycles through all armies, whatever their status. The space bar seems to cycle armies currently, but only if they haven't got other orders or are about to enter battle, for instance. We're talking about a key which always goes between armies, no matter what.



3) Having up/down keys to navigate menus (armies in the military screen, cities in the city list screen, etc).



4) A key that 'clicks on' the top notification that's minimized (to maximize its pop-up).



5) A key to force move a unit in combat. Currently, if you know a high initiative unit of yours is going to vacate a space, it's really tough to give a lower initiative unit a move order to the space that's just being vacated. Not impossible (I've managed it myself, on occasion), but you have to try all sorts of clicks before the move order 'sticks'.



I think those are the main ones. Anyone else think of anything else?



EDIT: One thing I've seen mentioned a couple of times, though it doesn't affect me - can we switch the 'end turn' button to being the main Enter key, and put the 'chat' button somewhere else please... folks who don't have a numeric keypad on their laptop find that very difficult, and without the ability to rebind keys, that's an issue.



Once again, thank you Matthieu. You are, as usual, awesome.

Hi all,



So, to answer your requests:



1/ Fids : OK. Probably will map it to "F" if it is not used already (have to check the code)



2/ Cycle through all armies : do you think the current space binding is not useful? So I could replace the current behaviour of the space key with the one you want? Otherwise I can add a new key. I know from the past that people are happy when you change something they got used to.



3/ Navigation in army/city list : I can understand it for armies, as selecting an army will display its contained units. Could map it to up/down arrow keys. I do not understand the usage for the city list though, as selecting one does not really do much. It is the selection of the subsection for construction, garrison, or population which is more interesting. Or do you mean that navigating the city list should activate one of these options by default?



4/ Popup up to notification: ok , can do. Probably will map it to N if it is not used already.



5/ Force move on a hex about to be vacated : implementing a shortcut is not hard in itself, but it is the battle code which is. I have talked to Thortillas and it seems complex, but he will look into it.



6/ Main enter key to end the turn (please note you have overspent your credit of 5 wishes ) : it is tricky because people are now used to pressing this to start chatting. And you find the same scheme in plenty games. How about Ctrl+Enter to end the turn? Enter would remain to start the chat, and the key pad enter would still end the turn as before.



Cheers,

Just checked, Bryn. I'm afraid not.

Frankly, if each hotkey is significant effort to add, I'd be happy just with the FIDSI display on/off toggle.



3) Doesn't the mouse wheel do this?

AmpliMath wrote:
Hi all,



I was in charge of implementing some of the shortcuts found in the game. It is rather tedious as every shortcut has to be implemented manually into the game. The technology which we use, Unity, is not really adapted to defining a set of key binding and possibly redefining it. For instance they offer classic commands to perform an action, move around, but these commands cannot be changed by code, they remain static (and limited to basic actions). Also this does not work well with country based keyboard where the key binding is different. We could try to bind to Windows specific code to retrieve scan codes and such, but of course it would not work on Mac (and we have no clue how to do it yet).



We hope Unity can add that better support for that in the future (and will beg them to add it ), but the bottomline is that keyboard shortcuts are cumbersome to implement, while we are focusing at the moment on adding cool gameplay content.



I think if you could list a top 5 of additionnal keyboard shortcuts, I could look into it on my spare time.



Cheer,

Very cool!!!

Searching the forums the last month, there's nothing on this, but plenty of activity last year from people begging (really, on their knees) for the ability to rebind hotkeys and to add hotkeys for functions like FIDSI display on/off and cycling armies and cities (no, space doesn't work, and neither does tab apart from going to capital city).



What's the status here? What's the official word? Is something happening, or is this one of those "we don't see the need so you shouldn't see the need either" type of moments from a developer? I'd be surprised because normally Amplitude are great at customer relations and listening to fans, so I'm assuming there's something going to be happening. I mean, it's a pretty fundamental omission.



Anyone know (official response a bonus )?

Thank you, Matthieu - that's a very generous offer. Looking around the fan base online, the keys that people are requesting most are:



1) FIDSI on/off toggle, so you don't have to put your mouse into the bottom right hand corner of the screen.



2) Having a key which consistently cycles through all armies, whatever their status. The space bar seems to cycle armies currently, but only if they haven't got other orders or are about to enter battle, for instance. We're talking about a key which always goes between armies, no matter what.



3) Having up/down keys to navigate menus (armies in the military screen, cities in the city list screen, etc).



4) A key that 'clicks on' the top notification that's minimized (to maximize its pop-up).



5) A key to force move a unit in combat. Currently, if you know a high initiative unit of yours is going to vacate a space, it's really tough to give a lower initiative unit a move order to the space that's just being vacated. Not impossible (I've managed it myself, on occasion), but you have to try all sorts of clicks before the move order 'sticks'.



I think those are the main ones. Anyone else think of anything else?



EDIT: One thing I've seen mentioned a couple of times, though it doesn't affect me - can we switch the 'end turn' button to being the main Enter key, and put the 'chat' button somewhere else please... folks who don't have a numeric keypad on their laptop find that very difficult, and without the ability to rebind keys, that's an issue.



Once again, thank you Matthieu. You are, as usual, awesome.

Hi all,



I was in charge of implementing some of the shortcuts found in the game. It is rather tedious as every shortcut has to be implemented manually into the game. The technology which we use, Unity, is not really adapted to defining a set of key binding and possibly redefining it. For instance they offer classic commands to perform an action, move around, but these commands cannot be changed by code, they remain static (and limited to basic actions). Also this does not work well with country based keyboard where the key binding is different. We could try to bind to Windows specific code to retrieve scan codes and such, but of course it would not work on Mac (and we have no clue how to do it yet).



We hope Unity can add that better support for that in the future (and will beg them to add it ), but the bottomline is that keyboard shortcuts are cumbersome to implement, while we are focusing at the moment on adding cool gameplay content.



I think if you could list a top 5 of additionnal keyboard shortcuts, I could look into it on my spare time.



Cheer,

Titan wrote:
Thanks, Nasarog.

No problem, not that I am special or anything. I also asked on steam. Sometimes you need to ask in several places.

Thanks, Nasarog.

Titan wrote:
I was excited by that until I saw "Last edited by Pikou; 09-22-2014 at 04:14 PM". It also says that 'adding hotkeys' is done... well, yes and no. Some basic hotkeys are there, but if they ran a poll for which hotkeys the players feel are still missing, I think they'd find a few obvious ones (like FIDSI on/off toggle). Remapping keys is down the list too, I notice, which is sad. Though of course that list hasn't been updated in six months so...



Anyone at Amplitude care to comment? Is there a well maintained version of the list Nasarog pointed me at? Where are we at with hotkeys and keybindings?



Is there an official feedback thread I should be pointing this thread at?

I inquired about having that document updated, and I was told that a request will be put in.

I was excited by that until I saw "Last edited by Pikou; 09-22-2014 at 04:14 PM". It also says that 'adding hotkeys' is done... well, yes and no. Some basic hotkeys are there, but if they ran a poll for which hotkeys the players feel are still missing, I think they'd find a few obvious ones (like FIDSI on/off toggle). Remapping keys is down the list too, I notice, which is sad. Though of course that list hasn't been updated in six months so...



Anyone at Amplitude care to comment? Is there a well maintained version of the list Nasarog pointed me at? Where are we at with hotkeys and keybindings?



Is there an official feedback thread I should be pointing this thread at?