I have been unable to play sc2 for many many months (lost count) but now that I finally have a working computer and internet i'm thinking of giving sc2 another crack
Before I stopped playing I had been wanting to develop new hotkeys so what better time than when i've basically forgotten everything ^^
Old Hotkeys:
I used Grid before ("q" was the first square on the thingy "w" being second square etc) with space bar as cycle base hotkey. I didn't hotkey queens so I would basically use space to go around my hatches and manually select queens and then inject
1 for main ground army
2 for infestors
3 for air
4 for hatches
Problem with this setup is it wasn't efficient for injecting or dealing with drops
additionally sometimes i felt limited only having 3 groups for units as sometimes I would want broods on a seperate key a ling harass squad on seperate key
So the new hotkey system i'm practicing is:
Basically I took grid hotkeys and shifted them all one key to the left along with my hand so now I have q, a and z free - I also got rid of cycle base hotkey
I'm using those extra keys now for screen position hotkeys as I found using the f2, f3 and f4 too hard / slow for me
I also changed hatches hotkey to 5 and put injecting queens on 6
6 - space - c - click - z - c - click - a - c - click - q - c - click
can inject 4 hatches super quickly as well as use same hotkeys for making drone transfers and defending much more effective
Now just to get accurate at using them cause so far in practice I have sometimes hit something like z - click - c meaning i select my hatch rather than injecting 0.o
Also the new method allow for easier access to some of the higher number keys without making access to 1,2,3 etc harder
I like IdrA style injects much more than "backspace" injects but that requires you to change a lot of control groups and doesn't really leave too much for units. Currently I'm cheap and use a razer naga so I can hit those right side hotkeys MUCH easier, but I use 1 for main army, 2 for infestors, 3 for broods/mutas/ultras etc., and I rebound 0 to E and keep all my hatches at "0" and start my main hatch+queen at 4, natural hatch+queen at 5, and that's because the naga hex's second row goes 4-5-6 (in ZvP I slide my right hand thumb up and down to tap between bases ) and I rebound 9 to ` (the key to the left of 1) for ling counterattacks or in the earlygame transferring drones (I just send 8 from my nat and 8 from my main instantly to my third, control grouped on `). The change of 0 to E is slightly annoying as there were a lot of hotkeys that had to be changed, I morph banelings with B and neural with W, and I have to change hotkeys if I want to play another race.
My camera hotkeys are for the 6th/7th etc. bases up to f4, then f5/f6 is rebound to space/tab, which a view of my ovie spread (to see whether its a banshee/medivac/prism etc.). I also have some quite common hotkey changes (S for ling speed, A for lair) and some quite weird ones that I still need to change (M for melee) but overall I'm really happy with my hotkeys, especially the E as it lets my make drones without ever having to move my entire hand up, so hotkeys like B and X (X=Extractor) are still very easy to reach and spamming 123123/124124 etc. seems much more unnatural than 12e12e12e (fits the hand "shape" better).
Even the smallest donations help keep sc2sea running! All donations go towards helping our site run including our monthly server hosting fees and sc2sea sponsored community tournaments we host. Find out more here.