Age Of Empires II

Late in the game when you are off battling your enemies, it is important to continue recruiting your elite military units. Unless you can manage to keep all of your warriors alive during battle, you'll need reinforcements.

You could scroll the screen back to your village, find your castle and issue the command to build more units. While you are doing that, the battle wages on without you. You may miss out on a lot of action because you are busy back in the village making reinforcements.

Using hot keys can save tons of precious time when things are busy. In fact, you don't even have to leave the scene of the battle to build reinforcements.

Using Hot Keys

Some buildings have preassigned hot keys, and some do not. For instance, "H" is assigned to the Town Center for you, but your castles will not have hot keys. However, you can assign the number keys (1-9, but not zero) to any unit, group of units or building you want, even an allied building.

If you press a hot key, the unit or building to which it is assigned is selected. The map does not scroll^* to the selected unit or building. With the unit or building selected, you may issue commands to it from wherever you happen to be on the map.

Most commands also have hot keys associated with them. Knowing the hot keys allows you to do things like build elite military units from anywhere on the map with just a few keystrokes.

Another thing you can do with hot keys is jump the map to the assigned unit or building quickly. To do so, press the assigned hot key twice rapidly.

If you double-tap a hot key assigned to a group of units, and the group is scattered all over the map, the screen will center on a point that lies somewhere between all of the units. When this happens, you may not see all of your units since they are too far spread out to all fit on one screen. It is possible that you won't see any of your units at all. If this happens, you may want to right click on a point on the map to have them gather together again.

^* Town Centers are a bit of an exception. First, the "H" hot key is pre-assigned. Secondly, pressing "H" just once will scroll the map to the town center. This does not happen for hot keys you assign.

If you have more than one Town Center, the same hot key will be assigned to each of them. Pressing "H" will scroll the screen to the first Town Center. Pressing "H H" again will scroll to the second one, and so on.

Assign Hot Keys To Important Units and Buildings

Some buildings do not have hot keys preassigned to them. For instance, the Mill and your Castles will not have hot keys. Also, your villagers and military units will not have hot keys. If you want hot keys on these items, you have to assign them yourself.

To assign a hot key, select a unit, group of units or building with your mouse. Then, press the control key and a number key to assign that number to the building. For instance, to assign the number "9" key to the selected building, press CTRL+9. If the hot key was previously assigned to another building or unit, it will be reassigned without warning.

I suggest the following hot-key assignments for the early game when you are exploring the map and building your village:

... and so on. Leave number 9 assigned to the mill throughout the game. The other assignments should be changed as the game progresses.

With these initial assignments, you can keep your scout moving while your villagers are assigned to construction tasks. As soon as your villagers become idle (because they have completed their construction task), you can double-tap the hot key assigned to them to give them their next orders. Also, don't forget about the period (".") key. Pressing the period key will select the first idle villager. Pressing it a second time will select the next idle villager. If there are no idle villagers (a desirable condition) you will hear a tone when you press the key. I recommend pressing the period key regular during the entire game to check for idle villagers. Always keep your people busy, even if it is just chopping lumber that you don't really need anymore: you can always sell the excess lumber at the market.

Periodically select the Mill (hot key 9) and press "F" to add "Reseed Farm" commands to the queue. By regularily visiting the Mill and reseeding farms, your farms will never die and you'll never run out of food.

Later in the game when you've explored most of the map and your village is mostly constructed, change the assignments as follows:

... and so on if you have more castles

... and so on if you have more groups of units

With the above assignments, you can reseed your farms (9 followed by F) and build your elite units (8 followed by T) while out crusading and crushing your opponents.