General question about unit control

General Discussion
1

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to learn Starcraft 2 and have a question about unit control. I am wondering if it is possible to box select a group of multiple types of units (I.E. tanks and marines, and issue commands to stim the marines and siege the tanks at the same time while still having them all selected (Should be possible since each have separate hotkeys, right?).

The only way i have found so far is to use the TAB button to cycle through the sub-groups of the selected units. Obviously there is a lot of room for error using this method and it is less than ideal in the heat of battle.

So the action sequence i’m hoping for would be:

Box select multiple units --> T to stim marines —> E to siege tanks. This instead of box select multiple units --> T to stim, --> TAB to cycle unit subgroup --> E to siege tanks.

It’s not hard to imagine how messy the second option would be in the heat of battle with many types of units.

The other method that I know people use is to hotkey the tanks and marines to separate hotkeys and control them seperately, which seems less than ideal as well, especially with Terran units that require so much individual control, being able to select a group and issue commands to each unit type in that group would seem like a necessary mechanic for a game like this.

Is this somehow possible?

2

So far as i am aware, this isn’t possible. Part of it is a limitation of the command card, and another part is that certain units share hotkeys to do an actions. For instance, the default hotkey for sieging up a tank and a liberator is E. However you won’t
Always want them to siege in the same place, and when you siege a liberator, you also have to place the zones down.

1 Like
3

Makes sense that conflicting hotkeys would be the limiting factor, i guess. I didn’t realize that some actions shared the same key. Perhaps assigning an individual hotkey to each unit ability or action would require to too many keys to be ergonomically viable. In that case i suppose that continually adding new units to hotkey groups or ctrl+clicking is the next best solution.

4

Or use the “Add alternate” option to add “Space Bar” - the most accesible key available to the most repetitive tasks (in my case: Build, Build Cannon, Storm, Launch Nova, Blink, Shade, Guardian-Shield, Revelation, Time-Warp). You have just to press Tab-Space to activate the ability.
I use Control-Groups inside Control-Groups…

First it might look confusing but latter with practice it comits to the muscle memory and you can’t return back…

P.S: As mentioned in your thread in terran-section the ability to have the Spell-Priority user-definable would be a grrat thing for all three races.

5

yeah that would be a huge QOL chnge for everyone.

1 Like
6

They did it Tychus’s outlaws in Co-Op, so if we ask Blizzard, maybe it’ll happen! :grin: