Hotkey your production.

I already set hotkeys for temples, towers, forts, idle merchants, idle fishers (F1 - F5). All of these save me having to leave a fight.

Now I'm hotkeying my production buildings.

Select your granary, press shift, select your lumbermill and smelter. Ctrl group them to the number you want (Ctrl - #) You can control group only foundations if you wish.

When you want upgrades hit # then use mouse in right hand bottom interface to select your upgrade buiding required, they display top to bottom granary, lumbermill, smelter. Then hit A or B for upgrade required. eg

Say you want all economic upgrades and your buildings are ctrl group 5. (close to A and B I like 5)

Hit 5 interface (with mouse) A 5 interface A 5 interface A. Done!

We had hotkeys for production but for some reason they are gone. hope this helps.

I always just tab through until I get to them, since I never seem to remember the hotkeys when I assign them lol.

I never use control groups, I hate them!

i always make them but then dont use em. makes me feel good ....

I allways use 1 for my scout ^^

Oh and for my production buildings Rax + stable + siege factory to 1 or something and then i can put the spawn point to where i want them to go instantly =) Works pretty good D

f1 rax f2 stable f3 seige factory f4 fort f5 tower f12 idle merchant ` idle fisher i use.

I put all my mil units in cntrl group 1 usually, and use shift or control shift to select them once there is a fair few of them. ' for spies and # for scout.

Why not use the default hotkeys k for rax s for stable o for siege factory etc. They are usually right under your fingers during the normal course of the game.

I use the normal hotkeys =) Works fine for me =)

I ctrl group my army only and shift click the units, but thats only with gunpowder and enlight armies, usually its double clicking and single clicking all the way.

I use a modified FusterCluck setup

I'd like to try the left-handed hotkeys, but I use a natural keyboard which splits the keyboard down the columns t-y, g-h, and b-n. Great for programming but bad for the left-handed hotkey setup.

mine is splitted the excact same way, but I have a z-board

How can you play without control groups? In a long game I typically make around 50 control groups, and activate well over a hundred. I start out with 1, 2, 3, and sometimes 4 for scouting units, then I later replace 1 with Granary, 2 with Lumber, 3 with Smelter. I usually use 0 for my main army or raiding party, then if I'm attacking I split up my army into control groups (9 for seige, 0 for non-seige, 8 for archers, 7 for HI, 6 for HC, or something like that).

Have you tried using your interface and subgroups to save you some of the ctrl group setting time? There's an option for subgrouping units makes it real easy to select one type out of whole army.

This would apply mainly to a players main army with cav seige and infantry to manouevre seperately but also wishing to keep em together...

Yeah, I use it a lot, but I find that just selecting a control group is a lot easier. I can't micro an army very well as it is. ?

yea I noticed that in the game I observed between u and dequebequr,(or whatever the name was S )...but micro is easy...its just to use each unit on the thing its good against...like archers>pikemen....cuz u easy wins battles agains inter players if u know how to micro cuz most inter's just out their army on the battlefield and then sit there hoping they'll win..

Entirely correct.

There is so much to do it is easy to be lazy. Those who are vigilant in using as many tricks as they can will generally win if they know good tricks.