Gameplay/Design Suggestion - Hotkey System

from Offworld Forums

I'm really enjoying the game so far! I'm a fairly seasoned RTS player, with the bulk of my experience coming from playing Starcraft at a relatively high level.

One thing I'd like to see implemented in OTC is a more advanced and, preferably, customizable hotkey system. In Starcraft 2, players can fully customize their hotkey layout, which has given community members the opportunity to innovate and try to optimize the way players can use their keyboard hand. Here's a link for reference.

 

What I'd like to see in OTC is being able to have complete control of buying and selling your resources using only the keyboard. This would free up the mouse hand to focus on moving around the map, scouting, building management, etc. It would be a great way to increase the skill cap in the game without putting any burden on casual players.

 

There's a lot to manage in terms of buying and selling resources, so I'm not convinced it's viable to have it all done on the keyboard, but it would be good to test. Here's a mock layout I threw together really quickly. Each resource would be tied to a number or F key, and ctrl and shift keys would control the buying and selling actions.

 

Lets say water is assigned to the 1 key. Controlling it would go like so:

shift+1 - Sell 10 units of water.

ctrl+1 - Buy 10 units of water.

 

Going down the list, I think this could be the default assignments for each resource, with players being able to reassign them to whatever is most comfortable for them:

 

1. Water

2. Food

3. o2

4. Fuel

5. Alumium

6. Iron

f1 - Steel

f2 - Carbon

f3 - Chems

f4 - Silicon

f5 - Glass

f6 - Electronics.

 

Figuring out how to fit in the 100 unit buy/sell action is difficult. At first I thought about using the alt key as a modifier, but it can conflict with F keys. In before AltF4 joke. :)

 

Maybe something like:

alt+shift+1 - Sell 100 units of water 

alt+ctrl+1 - Buy 100 units of water.

 

I'm hoping I'm not completely missing a system like this already in the game, but since there's no game controls menu yet i'm not sure. I only learned about the ctrl+shift+down hotkey to sell all resources by watching the dev stream, which i know LOVE and use often :)

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

4,493 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

Using the f-keys is not good for folks who use laptop to play. The f-keys are sometime binded to some hardware management. Also, try to do alt-ctrl-6 for fun.

That being said, i am not sure hotkeys for resources are necessary. The fact the sell all option need a hotkey is more that the interface is lacking than the hotkey is needed.

If you really want hotkeys, maybe selling could only be "1" for buying water and "ctrl-1" for selling it.

Reply #2 from Offworld Forums Top

I agree that F keys and alt modifiers probably aren't the ideal setup, was just throwing out something to work from. The best situation would be having fully customizable hotkeys so players can figure out what works well for them.

 

I think resource buy/sell hotkeys would be most useful in lategame scenarios. There are times when you aren't fully liquidating but need specific control over a few resources really fast. That's when i'd like to have keyboard hotkeys available. That way you could keep your mouse hand free to be scouting around, executing sabotage, etc.

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Offworld Forums Top

I have played about 27 hours of the game and strongly agree that the game would benefit from a lot more keyboard integration. This would be a much faster and more natural way of interacting with the game, and would be more ergonomic by reducing the users dependence on the mouse. In fact, I was about to write a post about the why the game would benefit from more use of the keyboard when I found the post from gca3034 above. Being a real-time strategy game, the game would greatly benefit from more keyboard integration - a game like Starcraft 2 would not be the same if it had little keyboard integration.

I also agree that being able to use the keyboard to buy and sell resources would be very useful. How to best do this is a slightly tricky question. An alternative approach to that described above would be to have a key to select a resource (possibly using `,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0), and then using other keys to buy or sell that resource (e.g. -,+, shift-, shift+).

I also think it would be useful to be able to set hotkeys for buildings, so that you can press the hotkey and the building would be selected (and maybe the map would be also centred on the building). Maybe the function keys, or the keys QWERTYUIOP... could be used for this.

It would be useful to make some modifications to the GUI to accommodate a keyboard interface. Specifically, each resource should display its hotkey next to it, and if the resource is highlighted, it would be highlighted. It would also be useful to show a list of hotkeyed buildings on the screen - maybe at the bottom. Being able to reassign hotkeys through the options menu would also be useful.  

Reply #4 from Offworld Forums Top

Hey everybody,

Better keyboard integration is important to us. It's not going to be an easy fix. I want to provide a re-bindable system where players can map the keys they choose to do all the options available on the keyboard. This isn't a simple task because a lot of the hotkey code is sprinkled evenly through a good portion of the code.

This is important to us, but is not something that we're likely to get to for a while. Thank you for your patience!

-Scott-

Reply #5 from Offworld Forums Top

Since the system DeftMunky wrote about is still a while away, does anybody have a comprehensive list of the current onces?