In every Real Time Strategy game, hotkeys are crucial in order to achieve victory and Age of Empires is not the exception.
Our objective at AOEBuilds is to help you improve in every aspect in the game and help you to climb up the Ladder and become a better player. That’s why we will talk about hotkeys today.
When it comes to hotkeys, there are 3 main and important topics that we should take into consideration before setting them: comfort, optimization and uniqueness.
Comfort
There are no hotkeys that are “the best” because there is some professional player using them, or because you saw them on a video on internet. We all play and enjoy Age of Empires in a different way, and, at the end of the day, we are the ones that will use our hotkeys. So we should feel good with them. Our recommendation is to change them to a better place in the keyboard where you feel comfortable, like the left side, with keys like Q to T, or Z to B.
Optimization
We use some hotkeys more often than others. For example, you build a barrack every single game; however, a bombard tower is not commonly seen. This means that it is better optimized to use your barracks key on letter B, instead of letter O, and bombard tower in a farther place like P, instead of A.
Another idea is that if you build military buildings with key V and you set the palisade wall with the same V, it would be easier to “quickwall”. Other players like Jupe take advantage of their extra mouse buttons to add important hotkeys, like the Idle Villager one. That could be really useful for its comfort and quickness.
Uniqueness
When we say that hotkeys configurations are unique, we are not only talking about how different they are between players, but also that keys should not override each other. For example, if letter B is the one for buildings, and E is the key for a house, it is not recommended to put the stable hotkey on letter E as well, as this will cause problems when it comes to build one or another. Please remember to use different hotkeys for different buildings. Following this, your villagers will always know what is the correct building!
We hope you found this article really helpful. If you want to know more about Age of Empires II, Build Orders, or watch guides and videos about different strategies on this wonderful game, don’t forget to subscribe to AOEBuilds.com and its memberships here!
And please remember, the best hotkeys are the hotkeys that you like.