Hotkeys for building units and for abilities
I have some issues with the way the hotkeys work:
when choosing units in the deck before the game starts, the positions of the cards changes the hotkey in the game for building them. So unless you have the same units in the same spot (i.e. X unit in first position in the deck, Y unit in second position, ...) the hotkeys shuffle around. The way I prepare for a game is usually "I guess I need this unit, I probably don't need this one. Yeah let's try this", I don't really see the point of having these inconsistencies. Unless it was what you're aiming for, I feel like I always associated specific units with hotkeys (i.e. I know that pressing 'A' is always making me a Shadow, and I don't have to waste time to check in the toolbar).
I had one instance where the specific spell of a unit had an hotkey change, and I believe this came down to the same reason.
I apologize if I got this wrong, or if I'm the only one actually complaining about this.
Comments
You are absolutely correct on how it functions. It seems like the greatest challenge comes from the unit variety offered. If every unit had a unique skill button, or unique building key, you'd end up with like 12 different hotkeys instead of just 6. We can imagine the issue magnifies when they introduce additional unit variety.
I hope that when saved loadouts come out this will alleviate our woes a little bit.
Even in saved loadouts I don't see how this feature would help, where you can simply change the hotkeys in the control settings avoiding the confusion of remembering slot positions in the deck. Maybe there is some advantages I didn't consider though.
Even visually I don't see how it would help to be looking for the unit position in the toolbar in the heat of battle to see, for example, how many of it you can still produce, or if you can produce it at that tier (although this is a lot less important overall).
In my opinion this goes against the concept of mechanical memory development in high level RTS matches (and alike).
I only meant saved loadouts would help because then you'd play many games with similar key setup for the different units and abilities, and hence, you'd get more used to it, and wouldn't have to look down. It would be more consistent and therefore less of a bother.
Again, the main reason for this system is to avoid overlap while still having large unit variety possible. If every unit has an unique key, then there would be way too many keys, as well as many that are unused if you don't bring that specific unit.
I guess you're right, having a different hotkey for each unit would be too much, I didn't think about how many units are really usable for every hero. As you stated I agree with the fact that having "saved" decks would improve this.
Maybe an improvement would be having the hotkey visible in the card selection screen, so that you know where every unit is going to show in the UI in game. Or something like that.
Huh. I tried rearranging units on the card selector, but it wasn't moving the hotkeys, just putting overlaps in red. I guess I should have tried launching the game to see if I could get my prime abilities on easy keys.
He's talking about production hotkeys. Ability hotkeys are set up in a way that, if possible, avoids hotkey conflicts and keeps abilities in roughly the same place. In some cases (especially in White), conflicts arise and the red hotkey labels show that "Hey, this ability hit a conflict; we're moving the ability to this hotkey to compensate."
The idea of having the production hotkey of the unit around the cards somewhere is a great idea. Love it, passing this along to our UI guys!
In general I tend to agree with your feedback. In two of my most recent games, I was using Conduits. In the first game, they were in my last slot. IN the second, they were in my third slot, and I kept trying to build them with S before quickly realizing my mistake. So I totally get the muscle memory weirdness with switching a unit's production hotkey from game to game. I'm also not sure there's a perfect answer here, but we'll try to get that into as readable a state as possible when we get back to making changes to Deckbuilding and the in-game command card.
Thanks for the feedback!