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Basic Battle Controls Tutorial


ArcaneExodus
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You may have heard that "The shift key" que increases the speed at which units train. You can use shift commands in 0 AD to accomplish anything; A combination of starcraft II and age of empires come together in a feature based way... Probably the unspoken of awesome part of the game.

By holding down the shift button you may cue multiple way points, assign your gatherer to build, move forward when finished, or gather something else after.

Constant production is important, but constantly having no idle villagers is key. For example with Britons you may utilize a dog to hunt units back towards a drop site, with Mauryans you can form a line of houses with your worker elephant building them... I highly recommend saving shift cues for builders to immediately move back to gathering once done building, and occasionally ordering those 24 units on near dead mines to move to the front lines.

That will save you from checking your idle villagers once you are in combat, but try not to form multiple ques for all your units. Shift queing your scout can even get him out of tricky spots without any attention.

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You may have heard ctrl + 1 will hotkey your units. A very important note is that its extremely difficult to capture garrisoned buildings; You need a large force. Instead of capturing a base use "The ctrl key" to order your units to attack a building rather than trying to capture it. (archers and skirmishers deal 1 damage vs buildings, so use other units)

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Finally you must know that instead of forming a bunch of farms, corrals produce food much faster... If you can hot key a group of corrals and constantly produce sheep, goats, or pigs by tapping z, than you could use 20 cavalry and 1 female instead of 50 females; Providing a nice garrison for your main base keeping your population low and full or warriors. Use way points to direct all the animals right in fronts of a drop site and try to balance ~1+1/3 cavalry per corral. Than you can avoid purchasing farming upgrades and farm much faster with horses boosted by female villager aura keeping producing constant and not overflowing animals can be much faster than farming, but it poses certain risks at different points in the game; While trying to obtain a stable flow of cavalry corral, it may distract you much more than a scout.

If you can sustain a large cavalry force for hunting than corralling may be a good follow up strategy... but not if you run out of food just after building 10 corrals and 10 cavalry.

By constantly using waypoints you can hotkey multiple barracks or other buildings to constantly que buttons by pressing ctrl 0-9 and train units with the bottom letter of your keyboard (Z, X, C, V, ect); Allowing you to focus on your army while maintaining constant production pretty easily.

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Use the halt command to have your units engage any nearby enemy, use it often if builders, gathers or units had bad orders. Halt with make them automatically engage the closest threat; For elephant generals you may decide to shift kill multiple soldiers; Because if you halt an elephant it will go siege the nearest building.

Utilizing shift, ctrl, and halt you can effectively control an army; And see what units work best.

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By hot-keying, way pointing, and issuing multiple orders you can multitask at a high enough level to produce quickly; Saving a lot of otherwise required effort to stay competitive. I just ask that you don't go too crazy with commands and stick to a few main hotkey groups and tasks. Than you can... Use a group of cavalry to kill all your opponents villagers a few minutes into the game; Harass them, rush them, or counter act these multitasking combos meant to hold one players economy down.

You couldn't do that in the old age of empire games, and the bases suck in star craft; 0 AD is a visual masterpiece. Use Q/E to rotate the camera of buildings before you contruct them. A bonus feature; I think is just too cool... Probably in some other game before, but hey; It's awesome.

Edited by ArcaneExodus
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I confirm this and think that almost everything written is correct, however it seems to me that you posted it in the wrong forum.

EDIT : didn't see the "tutorials & guides" subforum, but still, it seems to be tutorials and guides to modify the game itself, not gameplay guides, which belong i think to "gameplay discussion" forum.

Edited by Feldfeld
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