Recently tyr posted about the time saved by using the space bar, c and x to get around in Sins. I had never thought about this particular tactic, and have since began retraining myself to use camera buttons instead of wheeling.
What other interface shortcuts do you use that may not be obvious to new players?
And a more specific question: what do you keep pinned on the sidebar?
I don't bother with the pinning, to be honest
and I use default keys for the main interface to build buidling etc... my suggestion is that to find yourself pressing quickly is to know your keys
Honestly I don't understand the sidebar AT ALL. Anyone who wants to shed some light on it in this thread as well would be great.
As for tricks, I doubleclick to zoom in sometimes. Also, Alt + Click selects all of that unit in the gravwell, which is helpfull. Alt also makes the health bars visible.
first of all, set a hotkey to planets with shipyards on them. i like to use ctrl+0, since its easy to remember and i won't accidentally hit it when i'm reaching for ship fleet ctrl groups (usually on ctrl+1 -> ctrl+5 for me).
second of all, use the hotkeys for planet management just like you would ships. good hotkeys to remember for controlling planet actions:
planets use the same hotkey grid layout that ships do, for the most part, so the buttons match up to the same hotkeys.
q is planet upgrades, w is logistic buildings, e is tactical buildings. i don't use these taht often though, since you need to mouseclick to place a building anyway (i never use auto-place) i dont gain any speed from hotkeying it.
the ship building buttons (caps, frigs, cruisers) are on a,s, d respectively. these i do use alot. in particular i'll often queue up a bunch of LRFs and want to do it quickly. that's gonna be S then E. shift+E if i want to queue 5 at a time.
the f key is rally point. this is a REALLY useful hotkey for me. lets me change rally points very quickly so i don't have to keep microing orders to newly built ships.
escape button is the back button, goes up one menu level. i can reach it with my ring finger with the rest of my fingers on the hotkey grid so its really fast.
Thanks for the replies gentlemen. The problem is I started out playing with the mouse; now I have to train myself to use the shortcuts.
Anybody have any tips for sidebar usage?
I find the sidebar mainly useful for pinning planets with production facillities. Just unpin everything else (bar the planet where your main fleet is, maybe) so the sidebar doesn't get cluttered. This gives you easy acces to unit production by selecting the planet and then using hotkeys.
Always remember the hotkey layout: the 10 buttons in the lower right of the screen correspond to the letters on the top left of your keyboard: QWERTY, ASDF. It's actually quite logical when you get used to it. Much better then in Star/WarCraft where every ability has a random letter you have to remember.
How exactly does the pinning work?
I usually pin frontier planets and wormholes to the empire tree to notice an invasion.
Empire Tree 101
At the top left of the screen is a push pin icon. This icon pins the said gravity well, ship, or structure to the empire tree. The default setting is each planet is pinned along with capitol ships and starbases. I keep this clean!! I I turned off the setting in the user interface options window that auto pins planets to the empire tree. You can instead de-pin every planet if you prefer on your own, but that is a major time sink. I also de-pin each starbase since I often have multiple of them. This leaves only the capitol ships pinned which makes for ease of seeing whats going on with your battlegroup.
(Do not forget to set your frigate factories as a group. I make frigate factories grouped as control+0. This way im not struggling to try and zoom out to click on the planet that has the factory in it. I just hit 0 and then build what i need.)
Next, ships traveling in phase space have their own spot on the empire tree. When they jump they appear directly under your fleet icon and disappear again when they exit phase space. This tends to make the empire tree skip around which is a major pain in the ass when you are trying to micro a battle. Since you cannot de-pin this carrot MAKE SURE TO MINIMIZE IT (can only be minimized when something is actually in phase space...so minimize it on your first phase jump to your roid), it will keep it that way until you start the game again after a save or start a new one.
Another useful thing to use is the stacking button located to the right of the pin and search buttons. Clicking this will change the fleet from stacked to unstacked. Be aware this will make your empire tree fill up qickly but is important to be able to micro ship abilities since the computer is not always the best at it. If you de-pin things as I have stated above you will have almost enough room to see an entire fleet.
If you have more that one fleet with capitol ships in it....you can click the carrot of the planet they are at to close the planets tree so that you will again be able to see the main fleet by itself. This is especially needed when the Advent are in combat with you and they have 5 or more guardians and they activate the "you cant see crap ability" which for some reason the developers have yet to find some better graphical representation for the shield share.
Clicking once on your empires icon at a specific gravity well will select all the combat ships present. Clicking again will select all strike craft. This is useful if you need to suddenly give orders to all SC at a specific gravity well (say to kill off the 40 some odd torpedo cruisers the computer is sending in to rearrange the face of your starbase).
That's all I can think of atm, hope this helps.
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