Milo234’s Condensed
Relevant Information that applies to the VAST MAJORITY of those who still play
RA.
I said this would be condensed relevant information, so I will try very hard to leave out anything irrelevant except this sentence. Not all of this is relevant to everyone in my list on the other page.
First: Q
A Surprisingly large number of people who still play don’t seem to have a clue about how to Q at least reasonably well, so I’m going to explain how to learn to Q and get better at it. I list this as the first thing because I feel it is by far the most important basic RA skill.
First, here is a complete explanation of how to use Q for those of you who may have any amount of doubt about whether-or-not you correctly understand how to Q.
Q has 2 uses, the first is to waypoint units, and the second is to allow tanks to move while firing at enemy targets at the same time, effectively dodging enemy fire.
Q way pointing:
This will cause the selected unit to go in order from one point to the next. I believe there is a limit to the number of waypoints you can give a unit and it is around 9. This is useful in scouting.
Now the more fun use
of Q:
Your tanks will then go to the square you clicked on and continue firing at the enemy unit. If you keep holding Q and clicking on more places while the tanks are still firing, the tanks will act as though they have been waypointed and try to follow the waypoints while firing at the enemy unit, however that is not good. When I am Qing I usually keep retargeting enemy units and only giving 1 Q command at a time.
How to get better at
Q:
So for those of you who rarely Q or are relatively bad at Qing, the first thing to do is to get a friend and practice Qing with that person in 3v3, 5v5, 6v6, 10v10 whatever tank count tank fights. If the game is going lightning fast then turn down the game speed. Doing this for about 15-20 minutes should make you feel confident that you understand how to Q and make you want to do it more in the future. Most people I have done this with manage to win at least a few of these small scale fights the same night they learn how to Q. After your initial learning/practice playing Q master with friends is good to do and given about a week you should have reasonablly close to a 50% chance of beating me in an even tank count Q fight. Qing is very simple and it shouldn’t take you long to get used to it.
Basic Hot Key Review
Here are the most important hot keys to make sure you are using/start using if you don’t.
Ctrl + # - Groups - making groups is very important, with a little practice you should have little difficulty managing 2 groups at a time.
Shift – Used to add tanks to your groups. The sequence of buttons select new units, shift 1, ctrl 1 should be a very natural sequence to press for you.
H – Home, centers on CY
E – Selects all units on the Screen – can be very useful, especially on maps like p4 where you don’t have ore trucks getting in your way.
Now this next one I suspect many people don’t know about
Up/Down Arrow Keys – These scroll through your building list and also affect your unit list. If you don’t already use them, you need to start getting used to them because they are much MUCH faster than scrolling through the list by clicking the up/down arrows. Start using them and it should take you about a week to get used to them, and if you’ve been playing RA for 5 years and still don’t do this, perhaps you should start today lest you 5 years from now still don’t do this when you could have done it in your sleep.
BookMarks
These hot keys are important enough that I feel they deserve to be mentioned separately from the rest of the hot keys. So first to explain what the bookmark keys are:
Bookmarks are f9-f12 by default. To use them go to a spot on the map and press ctrl + bookmark, then whenever you press the bookmark key you will return to this important spot on the map.
Why are bookmarks particularly important?
Obviously bookmarks have great practical use in that you don’t have to scroll across the map to get to an important spot fast. This can be very useful if you are fighting all the way across the map and have things back at your base that you need to take care of, such as placing buildings, or other things, but the greatest use of bookmarks is in shifting tanks:
Imagine that you are trying to kill your enemy with tanks. So you go racing across the map to his base, and start Qing and are doing awesome (or rushing buildings and killing his shit), but then your tank count slowly diminishes to about half it’s original size and your opponent keeps popping out tanks in his base and there is no way for you to kill him without hitting H and going back to your base, scrolling to your war factories, selecting your new tanks, scrolling ALLL the way back across the map to send reinforcements by which time your opponent has wiped out your entire force. Well, now imagine if you could set 1 bookmark where you are fighting, and 1 back at your war factories. You could then go immediately back and forth between where you are fighting and your war factories thus giving yourself the ability to shift tanks long distances very effectively. You may think also, this will never work, f9-f12 are so far away from Q. Well, you are right, it will never work with f9-f12, therefore it is an EXCELLENT idea to modify your hot keys so that the bookmark keys are closer to Q. Imagine if you remaped F9 to be W and F10 to be R. Notice that E is right between W and R so you can just slide your fingers right across WER (set W = wars, R = fighting) and instantly you have all of your tanks on the map selected (and with a quick pressing of shift 1 ctrl 1 grouped). This is an EXTREMELY useful technique which must be mastered in order to achieve a high level of proficiency in using your tanks.
How to remap your hot keys:
Now that you have read the above paragraph I am sure you are thinking, damn I can’t believe I played RA for so long without using bookmarks, I gotta start using them immediately! So obviously you’re asking yourself, how can I go remap my hotkeys right now just as I was after I had been playing RA for 2.5 years and steeldart told me about them one night. Well here is the answer for you since I know you too will want to modify them immediately:
You can modify all of your other hot keys by changing the other settings in the Redalert.ini file. Some people I know of have changed their up/down arrow keys to be closer to Q as well so they don’t have to move their hands across the keyboard to use the arrow keys. I haven’t done this however.
How to get better at using your bookmarks:
Practice Practice Practice! Initially using your bookmarks will feel relatively awkward, kinda like learning to type, but with a little practice it becomes easy (I had been playing RA for 2.5 years and it took me about a week to get used to using them and about 3 weeks till it was practically second nature to me, I imagine most people should take a similar amount of time).
The first thing you should work on using your bookmarks for is placing guards/sending your scouts. It is much easier to set a bookmark on your barracks and a bookmark where you want to set up your guards. So set a bookmark on your barracks and a bookmark at your guard points and practice going back and forth and placing guards. This is much faster than using H and scrolling. Do it every game and it will very quickly become second nature.
The best way to practice shifting tanks with bookmarks is to practice playing maps like Q master. Get a friend and practice playing Q master with that person or ask a better player to practice with you and I’m sure they’ll be glad to help you improve. Q master max speed is great for shift practice since there are always more tanks coming out to be shifted. Q master slow speed is good to practice Qing and shifting at the same time.
When shifting tanks on Q master (and p4) you can use E shifting as opposed to select shifting. Since no other units can get in the way you can press a fast sequence like WER or WED which will immediately go back to your wars, select all your tanks, then take you back to your fighting spot. You still then have to press shift 1, ctrl 1 to regroup all your tanks together, so the entire sequence to press to shift would be W, E, R, shift 1, ctrl 1, QQQQQQQQQ. With a couple of weeks of practice this should be very, very easy.
The first thing people notice when they are practicing shifting on Q master tends to be that the fighting location bookmark has to keep being reset. This will be a bit annoying at first, but with time you’ll get used to it. Practice will make this easy. I believe when I play Q master max speed I personally press W, E, D, shift 1, ctrl 1, ctrl D immediately everytime or either that I reset ctrl D before I go back to my wars to shift.
The other type of shifting, select shifting, is slightly slower but is still extremely useful and must be mastered. On maps like p4 and Q master there are no other units to get in the way, but on maps such as Path, Money map 2, Guerilla Forest, hjk6, and many others, ore trucks and infantry and other units will get in your way if you are pressing E. When doing select shifting, I press W, select tanks at wars, D, shift 1, ctrl 1. This is slightly slower than E shifting but is still extremely fast and very useful.
This ends what I believe is a short, thorough explanation of the basic skills necessary to get to be good enough that I would call you at least a decent player.
If everyone in my list on the other page were to take the 20 minutes necessary to read through these 4 pages of information and seriously try it, within a month the average skill level of the remaining RA community would sky rocket, and I know I personally would love for that to happen. I don’t know if the rest of you would like that as well, but if you’re playing a game where the objective is to win, I have above mapped out what you can do that would in about a month bring u to being able to easily beat almost everyone who still plays but 10 players effortlessly in 1v1 and this will also help you greatly in 2v2/3v3s.
The main thing that separates players by skill level in RA is how fast they are, and the above things take great control and speed to be able to do effectively, and practicing them will help you achieve a new level of RA skill that should help you to make a huge leap from the noob level to the pro level.
If you take the time to read the above 2.5 pages and don’t try to do it, you make me sick. If you do try it, I applaud you.