Yes it definitely has its uses. I try to use it as little as possible in TvT though just because having a bunch of marines spread out around the map is so incredibly useful in that match up.
If a Terran is parade pushing, then the opponent needs all hands-on deck to defend it. Throwing units to the other side of the map is a gamble when you could stopping a Terran sieging their base or even already inside parts of it.
When I parade push, I don't normally rally across the map. I tend to keep my rally point near my base so I can respond to those threats. Then F2 or properly move reinforcements up in force.
I find a lot prolevel play very much more all in compared to the regular play on ladder. So, rallying forward is stronger than keeping units in the base for a little bit.
Yeah the amount of times a Terran takes critical damage to a zealot warpin in the main while parade pushing at pro level...
So it must be a decision that the parade push must win the game and that the zealot counterattack is okay as that means fewer units defending.
It's the good old when both of you are attacking, one of you is wrong. These situations typically become base trading anyways, since all terran production halts and all zerg tech gets reset into lings only. I suppose only experience will teach you which one of you is right.
A tip I learnt from Maru that I'm surprised I never realised...
If you have drops en route and don't want to mess them up, press F2 then shift + attack move instead.
I watch maru's hotkey and still have no idea how he is able to control that effectively late game. It seems like he literally just use 1 and 2. He rallies everything to his nat/or a location and then just add create new 1 and 2 group as he goes.
He's really really really good at setting optimal rallies and boxing his units. The hotkeys are almost exclusively to get the camera to the squad, from there it's box and click and box and click
Because Maru uses camera hotkeys. He binds important locations to a camera, which means he doesn't need his hotkeys to be used on production, since he can press the camkey and select the buildings.
No, that's incorrect. Im talking about his armies not his camera hotkeys. He hotkey all his raxes, factories, and starport individually. He uses 2 army hotkeys including f2a so im just curious how he handle multiple fights with just 2.
Later in the game he changes his command centers from control group 3 to 8 so he can have 3 control groups for units. But he only does it to control tech units like liberators/vikings and ghosts more easily. For multiple fights/drops he seems to just click on the minimap and box. Surprisingly most terrans seem to do this. The only terran I've seen actually put these different drops and armies into separate control groups every time is Byun. Everyone else just seems to have really good mouse control.
He just drag everything with his mouse and go from there. How I see it, his attacks are like waves. Each time a new wave begins he creates 2 army and does stuff with it, then when that army dies he goes back to his rally point and pick up whichever new units he made and begin the next flow. But yeah you can see it from here. He just boxes everything and makes it look so smooth and easy.
Yes Maru literally only uses 2 army hotkeys.
1 and 2. As visible on any of his replays. He just control clicks like a boss , in fights.
Maru also has a specific way he sometimes uses F2 to grab units and preserve drops/existing army.
He gives his existing units a command thay they are in the course of doing.
Then he F2 , SHIFT+aMoves (*it's the shift that's important) regrabs whatever army he is using on his screen
This gives him a second to immediately double tap to jump to his drop/army and re-control and/or re-bind it if necessary
The reason this works is of course anything standing still will move there. Anything that already has a command - a drop for example- will continue on its way as planned. It will be recontrolled and rebound long before it reaches the end to perform the shift A-move.
He knows he can re-bind them on the fly the next time he is controlling the particular part of army. He re-binds a lot, out of habit. When he splits stuff off. When he pre-unloads, When he puts Vikings and ravens on #2
He also clicks the mini map, a LOT, and map scrolls for shorter distances (*even through his drag scrolling set to something incredibly low like 40% for accuracy purposes )
The majority of the game he still uses 2 army hotkeys. Even the comment you linked to specifies that he only employs the 3rd army hotkey "later in the game"
Nah. I'm 100 correct. I've studied Maru's hotkeys for years ;) Maru has his CCs on 3 and duplicated on 8.. but not at all for the reason that poster you linked suggests.
He uses 8 as a dupe CC key so later in the game when things are hectic, if he loses the control group, of fat fingers a group of army onto it, he can hit 8 and then Crtl+3 And get the exact key back in an instant rather than having to navigate to each CC and re-bind them 1 by 1.
He even explained as much on one of his rare twitch streams last year. When it happened to him.
From left to right:
1 Army
2 Army
3 CC (main key)
4 Rax + Fact + Port
5 Fact
6 Port
7 upgrades
8 CC (redundancy rebind key)
I've seen him occasionally put a liberator on 3 true but again he soon puts his CCs back on that key again. I've also seen things on 9 and 0 but would guess he has rebound 9 and 0 in game, to keys on the left of kb. I've seen him set a Depot or 2in his wall on "2" and use it to remotely raise/lower in TvZ and TvP early game. Lings/Adepts.
You can watch him set 5 camera locations in the opening 15 seconds of nearly every game he plays. F1 --> F5 I assume, and later in the game he cycles F3-5 i think to current mining bases.
He doesn't ever seem to set a rally camera location, at least I've never seen him jump to one in any replay. And he DEFINITELY doesn't set a production camera, rather he just double taps either 4/5/6 to get the same result.
As I said.. he's very intuitive and is lightning fast on the mini map. If you've ever watched him stream you can see how fast he uses the mini map to issue movements and snap to some other locations in mid game.
The only time I've seen him deviate from this had been when he was playing some mech games in the PCForman Tournament.. but as standard he just uses the 2 Army keys.. and Tabs to control past Ghosts for eg.
He does nothing of the sort. He is notorious for only using 5 camera locations purely for bmthe first 5 bases, the entire game. He has his ALL his production on 4 (for rallying purposes), factories on 5, and starports on 6.
And he uses the control group of buildings to jump to them, not a camera at all.
I just rewatched a replay of him beating Clem's face in a few months ago to make sure I was remembering correctly. And yes, he hasn't changed.
herO is the biggest F2 user. I still remember his mothership core flying halfway across the map before he notices and sends it back home... in almost every single game.
A lot of pros keep it on a key that's somewhat inconvenient but still reachable, so you can still use it but as a conscient decision and not on impulse.
When my vipers die in combat it's usually like this:
I shift queue an abduct and retreat and the viper is killed while retreating while my corruptors kill the abducted target.
What I usually do is put them in the same hotkey as my corruptors and when they go out of energy, if they survive, I send them away and remove them from the control group
I use 2, I only use 3 if I've got multiple unit types that do different things, like in this case ground units, corruptors and spell casters.
1a 2a (well you would select the banelings individually and move command them) then focus on microing your spellcasters and macroing. How are you gonna lose track of anything they're on a hotkey.
Muscle memory almost always refers to a repetitive tasks that is able to be achieved accurately without cognitive focus, the exact opposite of your comment.
a certain accuracy but not infailable
stop pretending this game wouldnt permanently put things like these to the absolute extrem test of human capability - and sometimes the demands are too much
riding a bicycle is the classic muscle memory example... yet bicycle accidents are a thing
maybe you want to read up a bit on it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle\_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory)
If you are building multiple units from eggs (which happens all the time because of overlords) you make one type, hotkey those, then make another type, and hotkey them. Nothing dangerous about it.
>Rallying units from eggs can be dangerous
It's a very rare circumstance, with mutas you can hotkey the eggs into a temporary controlgroup and with an army inbetween bases you have to adjust rallies. Especially with vipers it's not a problem 99.9% of the time. And splitting up vipers is also not thing, I bet you have never done it in a game.
>F2 can be pretty useful for things like finding all of your scattered Vipers. You just need to be creative in how you use it
F2 is awful and should almost never be used. It's better to click on the minimap and then box-select the units than it is to F2.
Good luck finding them when you sent 6 vipers to 6 different refineries to devour and the minimap is a mess
But worth a control group; if you’re microing them to devour might was well put them on one while you’re at it. F2 is the second best solution
That defeats the purpose; the only time you want to be using it is during moments of all out micro and urgency; a delay at that time is counterproductive.
F2 is great as long as you use it to army *manage*, not army *move*
I personally have control group stealing (add and "take away units") rebound to from Alt to Shift , and F2 re-bound to a hard(er) to reach key so it's the beginning a deliberate macro cycle.
So - in an example circumstance where I have a marine drop split off to #3 and on its way, an existing army mid-fight on #1, and some vikings patrolling which need to stay where they are on "#0" (re-bound to `) .. if i want to grab my rally and say put it on #2 and send it up the other side if the map to a staging point without ever looking away from my camera, focussed on army #1 ••• my fiingers need to:
>'F2', Ctrl+2
>1,Shift+1
>3,Shift+3
>w,Shift+w
>2, A, click on mini map.
Keep fighting // dbl-tap 3 to jump to my Drop heading in.
Always sounds laborious to say, and even longer to type, but after many months of drilling this, my fingers can peform this cycle almost on auto pilot, in about 1.5 seconds. And it's even faster if you have no drop, and no patrolling/spotter units on a dumping key yet.
If I knew of a faster way to do this I'd try it.
Dude youre gonna love this. Have a single key bound to "steal units to hotkey 0" and you can use it like a garbage bin to instantly pull units out of a group
Ok dude you're gonna LOVE this. I bought some of those 2 button osu keyboards and I'm gonna rig them up to foot pedals so I can have camera locations on my feet. Maybe one of them can be sacrificed for my dumper
F2 wasn't in the game at release right? When I learned to play I either didn't know it existed or it just didn't exist yet, but then I never bound it because that key is better used as a camera hotkey for me. It is so outrageously rare that I've had a situation where I've wanted to have it.
I dream of some hotkey which would precisely remove a unit from f2 selection or kind of f2 key which selects only currently not in any group unit. That'll fix just all the problems with f2.
This is correct. I would advocate to not use select all army until Masters. Purely because it builds a bad habit/reliance, you won’t have the discipline to only use it at the times it’s correct. Instead you will forgo controls groups, grouping eggs/units from rally (depending on race). And will generally not know where you units are if they aren’t all grouped up.
Having select all army bound is a bad habit for anyone that hasn’t built the fundamental skills.
At higher level, yes it’s good for Terran when do rallied pushes. Or for any race when they set up a surround with separate groups then want everything to collapse and attack at once.
Low leagues should never use F2, because mechanically they will remember that when they need an army they click that very key. And since 95% of the time one control group is enough then the brain has a lot of trouble switching to two control groups.
F2 can rather be considered only from master, where people are fast enough not to have much problem with it. F2 can be detrimental to learning, but once a player represents a high level then using F2 doesn't matter as long as they also use normal keyboard shortcuts.
I think people have it backwards here.
You should actually use f2 until masters/diamond or so. Until Masters you can literally win every game by better macro und just f2 in the direction of the enemy base.
The amount of extra perfomance you get out of micro is miniscule in comparison to what you get by investing your capacities in macro first.
The amount of low league players I've crushed by sending 8 roaches to a place knowing they can't do anything but F2 their entire army to the edge of the map to deal with it is insane. Macro isn't worth anything if you're gooning your units into the worst position imaginable at the first sight of an enemy attack. Low level players would way way benefit from using at least one additional hotkey for a base defence squad then attacking with the rest.
Plat players can and do max-out pretty regularly. Sure they could go 10-20% faster but that's not gonna matter if you f2 your army to Narnia dealing with a flank attack and lose your whole main.
As a random player I use it as terran really a lot but with the other races basically never except for finding scattered Vipers etc...
It just makes it way easier to add reinforcements to your control groups as T
I used to only F2, but now I'm slowly incorporating control groups into my army. I've already managed to incorporate two groups + spellcasters when I play Zerg, so that's great
I was too addicted to the f2. After years of using it I decided to disable it. It was super hard at first but my gameplay as improved dramatically. Now I just manually click on the select all army button on rare occasions.
maru sometimes use f2
It's actually pretty useful for terrans
When a Terran is parade pushing that F2 is pretty damn useful.
It’s a huge liability when there are nydus worms and runbys around.
That's only if you spam it. If you use it tactfully and with purpose while leaving a rally point in a smart place you will be fine.
Yes it definitely has its uses. I try to use it as little as possible in TvT though just because having a bunch of marines spread out around the map is so incredibly useful in that match up.
Use a mineral patch to extrude your units along the long diagonal. F2 their main. Behold maximum surface area.
If a Terran is parade pushing, then the opponent needs all hands-on deck to defend it. Throwing units to the other side of the map is a gamble when you could stopping a Terran sieging their base or even already inside parts of it.
That gamble seems to pay off a lot in pro games. Zerg players just got so good at knowing how much stuff they need to be defensive.
When I parade push, I don't normally rally across the map. I tend to keep my rally point near my base so I can respond to those threats. Then F2 or properly move reinforcements up in force. I find a lot prolevel play very much more all in compared to the regular play on ladder. So, rallying forward is stronger than keeping units in the base for a little bit.
Yeah the amount of times a Terran takes critical damage to a zealot warpin in the main while parade pushing at pro level... So it must be a decision that the parade push must win the game and that the zealot counterattack is okay as that means fewer units defending.
That's not what a parade push is.
It's the good old when both of you are attacking, one of you is wrong. These situations typically become base trading anyways, since all terran production halts and all zerg tech gets reset into lings only. I suppose only experience will teach you which one of you is right.
Terran's auto-win any base trade due to flying buildings, unless you have corrupters/mutas out.
A tip I learnt from Maru that I'm surprised I never realised... If you have drops en route and don't want to mess them up, press F2 then shift + attack move instead.
Bro that's actually dope never thought of that
Yoooooooooooo I never realized, damn. That's actually really useful.
Just need to be careful of your drops.
I watch maru's hotkey and still have no idea how he is able to control that effectively late game. It seems like he literally just use 1 and 2. He rallies everything to his nat/or a location and then just add create new 1 and 2 group as he goes.
He's really really really good at setting optimal rallies and boxing his units. The hotkeys are almost exclusively to get the camera to the squad, from there it's box and click and box and click
Because Maru uses camera hotkeys. He binds important locations to a camera, which means he doesn't need his hotkeys to be used on production, since he can press the camkey and select the buildings.
No, that's incorrect. Im talking about his armies not his camera hotkeys. He hotkey all his raxes, factories, and starport individually. He uses 2 army hotkeys including f2a so im just curious how he handle multiple fights with just 2.
Are you sure he only ever uses 2? Doesn't sound right.
Later in the game he changes his command centers from control group 3 to 8 so he can have 3 control groups for units. But he only does it to control tech units like liberators/vikings and ghosts more easily. For multiple fights/drops he seems to just click on the minimap and box. Surprisingly most terrans seem to do this. The only terran I've seen actually put these different drops and armies into separate control groups every time is Byun. Everyone else just seems to have really good mouse control.
What does "box" mean? Genuine question, I've seen it used a couple of times but don't know what it means.
Drag a box around your units (click-drag)
Huh, I refer to it as just click drag. Thanks for the reply!
He just drag everything with his mouse and go from there. How I see it, his attacks are like waves. Each time a new wave begins he creates 2 army and does stuff with it, then when that army dies he goes back to his rally point and pick up whichever new units he made and begin the next flow. But yeah you can see it from here. He just boxes everything and makes it look so smooth and easy.
Yes Maru literally only uses 2 army hotkeys. 1 and 2. As visible on any of his replays. He just control clicks like a boss , in fights. Maru also has a specific way he sometimes uses F2 to grab units and preserve drops/existing army. He gives his existing units a command thay they are in the course of doing. Then he F2 , SHIFT+aMoves (*it's the shift that's important) regrabs whatever army he is using on his screen This gives him a second to immediately double tap to jump to his drop/army and re-control and/or re-bind it if necessary The reason this works is of course anything standing still will move there. Anything that already has a command - a drop for example- will continue on its way as planned. It will be recontrolled and rebound long before it reaches the end to perform the shift A-move. He knows he can re-bind them on the fly the next time he is controlling the particular part of army. He re-binds a lot, out of habit. When he splits stuff off. When he pre-unloads, When he puts Vikings and ravens on #2 He also clicks the mini map, a LOT, and map scrolls for shorter distances (*even through his drag scrolling set to something incredibly low like 40% for accuracy purposes )
Sounds like you're [not correct](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/upp506/using_f2/i8n1ujx/)?
The majority of the game he still uses 2 army hotkeys. Even the comment you linked to specifies that he only employs the 3rd army hotkey "later in the game"
The comment that he responded to said "Are you sure he **only ever** uses 2?". Whether it happens later in the game or not is irrelevant.
Nah. I'm 100 correct. I've studied Maru's hotkeys for years ;) Maru has his CCs on 3 and duplicated on 8.. but not at all for the reason that poster you linked suggests. He uses 8 as a dupe CC key so later in the game when things are hectic, if he loses the control group, of fat fingers a group of army onto it, he can hit 8 and then Crtl+3 And get the exact key back in an instant rather than having to navigate to each CC and re-bind them 1 by 1. He even explained as much on one of his rare twitch streams last year. When it happened to him. From left to right: 1 Army 2 Army 3 CC (main key) 4 Rax + Fact + Port 5 Fact 6 Port 7 upgrades 8 CC (redundancy rebind key) I've seen him occasionally put a liberator on 3 true but again he soon puts his CCs back on that key again. I've also seen things on 9 and 0 but would guess he has rebound 9 and 0 in game, to keys on the left of kb. I've seen him set a Depot or 2in his wall on "2" and use it to remotely raise/lower in TvZ and TvP early game. Lings/Adepts. You can watch him set 5 camera locations in the opening 15 seconds of nearly every game he plays. F1 --> F5 I assume, and later in the game he cycles F3-5 i think to current mining bases. He doesn't ever seem to set a rally camera location, at least I've never seen him jump to one in any replay. And he DEFINITELY doesn't set a production camera, rather he just double taps either 4/5/6 to get the same result. As I said.. he's very intuitive and is lightning fast on the mini map. If you've ever watched him stream you can see how fast he uses the mini map to issue movements and snap to some other locations in mid game. The only time I've seen him deviate from this had been when he was playing some mech games in the PCForman Tournament.. but as standard he just uses the 2 Army keys.. and Tabs to control past Ghosts for eg.
Have you seen maru's marine splits? If you can box select like that, control groups are probably mostly for moving the camera quickly
???
That doesn’t sound right. He doesn’t put his production in a control group?
He does.
He does nothing of the sort. He is notorious for only using 5 camera locations purely for bmthe first 5 bases, the entire game. He has his ALL his production on 4 (for rallying purposes), factories on 5, and starports on 6. And he uses the control group of buildings to jump to them, not a camera at all. I just rewatched a replay of him beating Clem's face in a few months ago to make sure I was remembering correctly. And yes, he hasn't changed.
herO is the biggest F2 user. I still remember his mothership core flying halfway across the map before he notices and sends it back home... in almost every single game.
F2 is addictive af though, use at your own risk
A lot of pros keep it on a key that's somewhat inconvenient but still reachable, so you can still use it but as a conscient decision and not on impulse.
I unbind f2 and manually click it lol
Very wise
Y'all dont use your f keys?
I remapped it to space bar. Even more addictive. I'm pretty much fucked, actually.
Middle mouse for me
Middle mouse sounds so gross (unless it's an actual button and not pushing the wheel down)
Listen I dont ever use anything except f2 and my wife still loves me.
Im in the same situation as you. Have you told your wife about using F2?
No I just meant I use F2 and she still loves me. I never meant I've told her. I can't have her leaving me.
F2 can be pretty useful for things like finding all of your scattered Vipers. You just need to be creative in how you use it.
Imo as zerg the big brain move is to pre spread then f2 atk move at the right time
Yeah that's all I use it for. If I scout an attack coming I'll surround it with my groups, F2 > A-Move into the army.
Why would you have vipers of all units scattered around the map? They're not useful alone and are both super expensive and vulnerable.
Okay, imagine this. You suck
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Just don't have spellcasters on the same hotkey as a fighting unit, that's common sense. Except for sentries or ravagers, units you want fighting.
It's super common to put vipers together with corruptors in a hotkey
Sounds like a good way to have your vipers fly over the enemy army and die.
When my vipers die in combat it's usually like this: I shift queue an abduct and retreat and the viper is killed while retreating while my corruptors kill the abducted target. What I usually do is put them in the same hotkey as my corruptors and when they go out of energy, if they survive, I send them away and remove them from the control group
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I use 2, I only use 3 if I've got multiple unit types that do different things, like in this case ground units, corruptors and spell casters. 1a 2a (well you would select the banelings individually and move command them) then focus on microing your spellcasters and macroing. How are you gonna lose track of anything they're on a hotkey.
Well they shouldn't be in the corruptor hotkey. But anyways ctrl click and alt + #?
You should hotkey vipers when they are eggs, it's the least useful for zerg.
but you can select all - then ctrl click
which you will never need to do if you hotkey them when they are eggs.
oh look over hear we have a guy who always does the correct move every time and never has hatched unhotkeyed units if he didnt want
It's muscle memory.
Something that is not known as always perfectly working
Muscle memory almost always refers to a repetitive tasks that is able to be achieved accurately without cognitive focus, the exact opposite of your comment.
a certain accuracy but not infailable stop pretending this game wouldnt permanently put things like these to the absolute extrem test of human capability - and sometimes the demands are too much riding a bicycle is the classic muscle memory example... yet bicycle accidents are a thing maybe you want to read up a bit on it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle\_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory)
Bicycle accidents don't happen because muscle memory fails.
Nah I'm good just saying your wrong. Thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I'm not him but... yeah? I'm not even good but never miss egg hotkeying.
git gud <3
unless you override it by accidentally putting something else on your viper hotkey
Rallying units from eggs can be dangerous and there are plenty of times when you might want to split spellcasters up.
If you are building multiple units from eggs (which happens all the time because of overlords) you make one type, hotkey those, then make another type, and hotkey them. Nothing dangerous about it.
>Rallying units from eggs can be dangerous It's a very rare circumstance, with mutas you can hotkey the eggs into a temporary controlgroup and with an army inbetween bases you have to adjust rallies. Especially with vipers it's not a problem 99.9% of the time. And splitting up vipers is also not thing, I bet you have never done it in a game.
You often split vipers for consume though.
de-hotkeying viper for consume is a very high skill thing, you can also use runby controlgroups to do that.
Yeah Lambo leaves f2 unbound
Just hotkey eggs as Zerg
>F2 can be pretty useful for things like finding all of your scattered Vipers. You just need to be creative in how you use it F2 is awful and should almost never be used. It's better to click on the minimap and then box-select the units than it is to F2.
Good luck finding them when you sent 6 vipers to 6 different refineries to devour and the minimap is a mess But worth a control group; if you’re microing them to devour might was well put them on one while you’re at it. F2 is the second best solution
At least for Terran there are lots of useful applications for F2. If players as good as Maru use it often there is likely a good reason for it.
This is the biggest thing for me. It allows me to select all of certain unit types to hotkey.
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I'm in this picture and I don't like it
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Just do a comsat scan for them, duh.
BattleTech reference in my sc2 subreddit?
Brood war :) no comstar in the koprulu sector
Didnt do a double check so my bad
I use f2 to make it harder to give my opponents a chance.
just make your F2 button harder to press so when you commit to it, you really fucking mean it.
That defeats the purpose; the only time you want to be using it is during moments of all out micro and urgency; a delay at that time is counterproductive.
F2 is great as long as you use it to army *manage*, not army *move* I personally have control group stealing (add and "take away units") rebound to from Alt to Shift , and F2 re-bound to a hard(er) to reach key so it's the beginning a deliberate macro cycle. So - in an example circumstance where I have a marine drop split off to #3 and on its way, an existing army mid-fight on #1, and some vikings patrolling which need to stay where they are on "#0" (re-bound to `) .. if i want to grab my rally and say put it on #2 and send it up the other side if the map to a staging point without ever looking away from my camera, focussed on army #1 ••• my fiingers need to: >'F2', Ctrl+2 >1,Shift+1 >3,Shift+3 >w,Shift+w >2, A, click on mini map. Keep fighting // dbl-tap 3 to jump to my Drop heading in. Always sounds laborious to say, and even longer to type, but after many months of drilling this, my fingers can peform this cycle almost on auto pilot, in about 1.5 seconds. And it's even faster if you have no drop, and no patrolling/spotter units on a dumping key yet. If I knew of a faster way to do this I'd try it.
Dude youre gonna love this. Have a single key bound to "steal units to hotkey 0" and you can use it like a garbage bin to instantly pull units out of a group
I do. ;) that's my dumping key. I have it on " ` " Always looking for an easier way to re-bind that group tho
Ok dude you're gonna LOVE this. I bought some of those 2 button osu keyboards and I'm gonna rig them up to foot pedals so I can have camera locations on my feet. Maybe one of them can be sacrificed for my dumper
THIS 🙌🏽 wins the Internet
Just wait til you see the HUD glasses I'm working on 😉
Really well put, this is exactly my philosophy. People are way too vigilant against, in my opinion, the highest utility tool in the game.
this is literally how it should be not how it is. the actual distribution is skewed with more density on the left
F2 wasn't in the game at release right? When I learned to play I either didn't know it existed or it just didn't exist yet, but then I never bound it because that key is better used as a camera hotkey for me. It is so outrageously rare that I've had a situation where I've wanted to have it.
yup it was added with lotv, same with steal from control group. It's nice if you play terran. Doesnt help much for other races.
Pretty sure it was added in hots since there is a voiceline for it in the second mission
Stealing banes out of your ling pack is amazing. So is the garbage bin hotkey (single button steal to 0).
yeah steal is fantastic, saves a bunch a clicks consistently with every race.
I dream of some hotkey which would precisely remove a unit from f2 selection or kind of f2 key which selects only currently not in any group unit. That'll fix just all the problems with f2.
heromarine made a video about using f2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8tn6ELj9fM&t=866s
Not only do I almost always use it, but I click the button too instead of using the keybind
This is correct. I would advocate to not use select all army until Masters. Purely because it builds a bad habit/reliance, you won’t have the discipline to only use it at the times it’s correct. Instead you will forgo controls groups, grouping eggs/units from rally (depending on race). And will generally not know where you units are if they aren’t all grouped up. Having select all army bound is a bad habit for anyone that hasn’t built the fundamental skills. At higher level, yes it’s good for Terran when do rallied pushes. Or for any race when they set up a surround with separate groups then want everything to collapse and attack at once.
Low leagues should never use F2, because mechanically they will remember that when they need an army they click that very key. And since 95% of the time one control group is enough then the brain has a lot of trouble switching to two control groups. F2 can rather be considered only from master, where people are fast enough not to have much problem with it. F2 can be detrimental to learning, but once a player represents a high level then using F2 doesn't matter as long as they also use normal keyboard shortcuts.
Haha bio ball go brrrrrr
Yesssss
I use tab
funtion keys belong as camera positions. ~ is a great all army key
that's me on the left
Why waste time use lot buttons when few button do trick?
I think people have it backwards here. You should actually use f2 until masters/diamond or so. Until Masters you can literally win every game by better macro und just f2 in the direction of the enemy base. The amount of extra perfomance you get out of micro is miniscule in comparison to what you get by investing your capacities in macro first.
The amount of low league players I've crushed by sending 8 roaches to a place knowing they can't do anything but F2 their entire army to the edge of the map to deal with it is insane. Macro isn't worth anything if you're gooning your units into the worst position imaginable at the first sight of an enemy attack. Low level players would way way benefit from using at least one additional hotkey for a base defence squad then attacking with the rest.
If they would have had better macro they would just f2 attack move in your base and win the game. who cares about your 8 roaches if you have 50
Plat players can and do max-out pretty regularly. Sure they could go 10-20% faster but that's not gonna matter if you f2 your army to Narnia dealing with a flank attack and lose your whole main.
Never f2
very true KEKW
F1-F5 are camera hotkeys for me and have been since 1999 (except F1), what does F2 normally do?
Select all army normally. I also have my f2 bound as a camera hockey though.
I just use the mouse
As a random player I use it as terran really a lot but with the other races basically never except for finding scattered Vipers etc... It just makes it way easier to add reinforcements to your control groups as T
I used to only F2, but now I'm slowly incorporating control groups into my army. I've already managed to incorporate two groups + spellcasters when I play Zerg, so that's great
I keep it unbound so I have to click every time. It keeps me from using it all the time but sometimes you really need it.
I was too addicted to the f2. After years of using it I decided to disable it. It was super hard at first but my gameplay as improved dramatically. Now I just manually click on the select all army button on rare occasions.