I do an area selection while pressing o, seems easier; same goes for most selections onscreen. I also slid the threshold slider in the settings to ~50%, otherwise my pixel people won't get away alive.

Okay. Thank you again for your suggestions.   Btw, I found the solution. I just reseized me map to the exact same map size - and voilá, it does not crash anymore. Strange.

Hello @Bob F., welcome to the forums! I'm glad we've got some senior gamers, it's always nice to hear.  The most important hotkeys a beginner needs to know are the control group hotkeys, idle worker hotkey, batch training modifier and the production hotkeys. Control group hotkeys: - CTRL + any number from 0 to 9 - sets everything currently selected to the control group number - any number from 0 to 9 - recall the control group from that number.  Idle worker hotkey is a period (.).  Batch training modifier is SHIFT by default.  Production hotkeys are z, x, c, v, etc... You will learn other hotkeys as you play the game. I've been playing for a while now and even I don't know all of them.

I think short gameplay clips with captions could help a lot. I’d be happy to help cut a few from existing matches or streams if you’ve got source links handy.

I found the manual too sparse I had to look at the tips fo what should be in the manual ex the min map shows how many idle works you have , the top shows how many workers are on what resource if you add this to military that don't gather you find your total pop this should be in the manual . Wounded soldiers you have to sellect a group of soldiers to find one wounded then deselect to select one wounded only ,then press 0 and double click at the same time and you will select all wounded only So as I said the hotkey chart should be redone