Here's a list of hotkey, mouse, and macro tricks that I've found useful in speeding up or simplifying routine aspects of Age of Empires 2. While they won't necessarily increase APM, they help me keep up with crazy moments of the game more easily, so hopefully you find at least some of them helpful!
Patreon: / spiritofthelaw
Background music from Epidemic Sound: www.epidemicsound.com
Game: Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, with Forgotten Empires, African Kingdoms, Rise the Rajas, and Last Khans expansions
Spirit of the law is why I came back to this game
me too
Same here, along with T90's videos. I bumped into them during the March lockdown and downloaded the game immediately!
Same
Spirit of the law is why I CAME , period
Same here, he got me and my friends back into HD and excited for DE.
Today I learned about the "go to last notification" button. I'm amazed and I think my play just improved instantly.
I set it to backspace and use it quite often now, it's a good when you hear the attack notification but don't see the enemy on the mini map!
It's cool, but it's easy to jump do different notification in post late castle age. E.g. You're getting raided while booming and producing military. There's a decent chance that even if You click almost instantly, Your screen will go to newly produced unit or if You ran out of food to an idle farmer
That dont help a lot cos u hear a relic then u push that key and it send you to a barrack finished, villie created, wolf attack, farm finished and then it will send you to the relic..
Same
@@andrewjohnhodge6599 That's actually default on Warcraft II at least that I know of
Does anyone remember the time when villagers used to just stand around after building a resource camp?
Yes
That's aoe1
@@jeremyleresteux2027 Nope, it was also in aoe2 before aoc
@@jeremyleresteux2027 that's aok, Age of KINGS
I remember my mind being blown when I could queue up farms for the first time. No more "age of farms" when they all go dead
I love that the AoE2 community has such dedicated, high quality content creators like SotL.
Huns did not have atheism. The reddit Age of EMpires 2 "community" banned me for saying the truth. Atheists can't take criticism. I did many videos proving atheists wrong about everything.
0:40 set "select all Town Centers" to mouse button 1:50 change "select idle villager" button from default to more accessible key 2:54 use Alt to select sheep/ villagers without selecting military 4:38 use "all stables", "all barracks", etc. hotkeys 5:16 use waypoints and command queues by holding Shift 6:09 select/ deslect specific units with Ctrl and Shift 6:46 don't stress over late game farm placement 7:14 use the market 7:58 make more military buildings in late game
Noice
Gj this should be pined.
Thanks ❤
Missed 2:27 go to last notification, otherwise great
Thanks, man!
Spirit of the Law: *Uploads* Me, who does not play AoE2: "Interesting."
That is how I started
It's like 12 bucks on steam rn. Absolute worth. Multiplayer is more alive than some triple AAA games.
just buy to support the devs and community is also worth it
@@Coolnessman1 I have 300 hours in and I really can't get into the multiplayer, even having followed SotL for over a year now, gotten all gold on Art of War, and playing in noob only servers, I just get my ass handed to me 9/10 times. Love the campaigns and historical battles though and am still only like halfway through doing all those
Wowww!! Great bro
That’s crazy and all, but I asked for a video about tree hp.
Trees have 2 hp. Villagers do 1hp damage to trees when they chop them down.
@@bladactania Yeah but I need the maths. How many times do a villager have to strike a tree to fell it?
@@bladactania Trees have 100 hp
then do another video about cow hp
@Emre Vural that's 100 percent some kind of a rickroll but I will click anyway
One more very useful tip : Use same hotkey for 'select all mills" and mills upgrade ; select all lumbercamp and wood upgrades ; select all mining camp" and gold upgrades. For example if lumbercamp Hotkey is K, you just need to type 'KK' once you are up into feudal age to get wood upgrade without moving screen.
Tricks I use to make YOU play faster: Settings->Playback speed -> 1.5
Peter Peterson play faster by playing slower
Faster and a bit inefficient, just like late game farm placement
SOTL : "The market is not a replacement for well balanced economy" Hoang : "Naniii ?!?!?!?!?!"
Saracens: "What does i mean"
Hoang : What is economy? 😂
Market EAT economy.
Austrian Economists: "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEE"
@@annakotwica1912 Jakas ania gra w age'a?
The real art of playing Age is to fight efficiently while building beautiful cities (like in the amazing campaigns!)
I actually mapped my idle vil and TC hot keys to the 2 extra buttons on my mouse, definitely helped me speed up. Too bad I’m still terrible
Same
just keep playing. I'm also still bad, just keep playing
@@Cra3ier lol I'm glad I'm not the only one
isnt that default?
my extra buttons wasn't recognized by the game
when your aoe2 play style starts to look like you were playing piano, than you know that your getting closer to perfection :D
Hmmm... I wonder if some wisecrack has figured out a way to play AoE2 with an actual piano
@@ismaelsantos5378 make this happen!!! And learn the music of war and peace
@@RobotShield Like a symphony of frost and fire, but with less frost and more misplaced farms x)
nice one bro :D :D
@@ismaelsantos5378 mind blowing
I think the Idle villager button in my mouse and waypoints are the things I use the most, as well as "go to town center" specially in the early game. I love way points for, for example, when 4 or 5 villagers are in the last 2 bushes, I click both bushes in sequence and then I made them construct the farms or go for a deer, and with that I know those guys are going to be busy for the next 10 minutes. Also I like to use waypoints with the monks. Click on the relic, then monastery, then relic, then monastery and again, one guy busy for a while.
This is the best "tips and tricks" video I have seen for Age of Empires period. Actually important, meaningful stuff, that might not be obvious to many players.
2:37 "Whether that's the sound of a monk picking up a relic, an alarm that you are under attack, the sound of a university being built, unit created, unit created, unit created, unit created or unit created."
Fun fact: You don't need to play faster when you play just the campaigns, cause you can pause the game all the time :D But seriously, some of these are going to help me improve a little. I played this game back when I was a kid. in 2013 I got the HD version off Steam and now I'm playing the DE. Am 30 years, by now, lol. I wouldn't say, I'm a bad player in this one, but surely I can improve a little more. Thanks for that Specially the shift button thing will come in handy, that's one I didn't know yet and I really never made use of the hotkeys, tbh. But might set them up and see how I do then.
So useful. Between you and T90 I've rediscovered this gem from my childhood and the buzzing community around it. Brilliant info
4:42 I adopted the UIOP setup from one of your older videos and have been using it with CTRL to select all (fe. CTRL-U = all barracks) and this improved my game by a lot. I'm happy to see you making a video for newer players, I consider this a must watch for anyone looking to play online
SOTL: Here are some tips to help new players improve! Me: :D SOTL: So first off, use control groups on thr extra buttons on your mouse. Me: Looks at £5 mouse i bought on ebay 5 years ago* ok
well you have still keyboard with at least 32 alphabet letters, 10 digits and some symbols :D
Thank you so much for this! It's easy to peruse the hotkeys and controls in game, but knowing exactly what they do and when to use them is a different story.
Also allways patrol rams into your opponent's base, when you cracked his defence. This way the rams destroy all buildings and you don't have to worry about it.
just set to aggressive.
Also for defence. Getting pushed by archers handcanons or seige? Start adding rams they fuck other seige and soak up gunpowder and arrow units attacks. They are also super good at defending archers vs an opponent that doesn't micro battle his melee units and archers will attack the rams while your archers kill the melee units
@@Pentix51 I think the problem with that is they don’t travel very far to search for buildings whereas you can set the range of attack to your liking with patrol.
Just finished the playlist - been playing DE with tons of friends in private lobby's for the past few days; first time I've touched AoE since mid-00's when it used to be pretty much the only real game I had at my disposal during my childhood. This guide is great, all in the playlist are. Known about you for a while now and I'm glad there's finally a reason to binge all your videos, definitely feels like I've learned a lot (especially about siege and hotkeys). While by the time it comes out (if it does) it probably won't be necessary to me personally, I'm really hoping you'll make a naval guide at some point. Nevertheless, awesome work!
I never played the game, probably never will, and I don't even know a single person who does but I'm still subscribed for some reason
I played over 10 years ago, but besides that, I'm the same.
I believe you're here for the intro 😆
Wanna play together?
@@MrRohde97 count me in
@@teutonicson1648 Yeah, that's probably it.
Recently started playing this game online with friends. These videos have been sooooo useful. Thanks so much!
Such immensely important and helpful tricks - thanks a lot!!
dope video. Have you tried using the "select all millitary units on the screen" hotkey? I set mine to spacebar and I use it all the time. Especially if you are good at using shift/cntrl to select/deselect, I find the easiest way to grab units in a big fight with lots of different units is just jam spacebar and then figure out which portraits to click. It's easier than trying to double click on a knight that's running around when you're fully zoomed out.
Really helpful Spirit! Great video, as always!
The ALT key tip is really new to me. Had no idea. Putting buildings in control groups is also useful, and somehow up until now I only thought of assigning to military units
This is pure gold. Thanks Spirit! Breaking into the game for the first time since childhood and this is addressing my bottlenecks.
I'm in the process of playing AoE DE. Its been many years since I played and I'm really enjoying it. AoE 2 DE is next and then AoE 3 DE. Its bringing back a lot of wonderful memories.
I have one those "MMO gaming" (G600) mice. It has 12 buttons on the side. It makes control groups extremely easy. I usually put barracks, ranges, stables, and castles on 7,8,9,0. Being able to select stuff instantly with your thumb is pricelessly useful. I highly recommend 12 button mice, it comes in handy in most games. (edit: It takes a few days/weeks to get use to using 12 buttons, but you'll never go back once you learn it)
Was literally watching one of your videos when this one dropped👌🏻🙌🏻
Select all Idle Villagers is also a thing. In late game where you created a few villagers back home but are fighting in the front, instead of going through all idle villagers, I just use the select all idle villagers hotkey and send them to a lumber mill or spam farms or something. I use CTRL+TAB for that, which is easy to remember, because Tab is select next idle VIllager like for you.
That alt + box to ignore military is not something I knew existed, real nice feature. Glad I tuned in.
thank you for the video, definitely a few good tips I did not know. Keep up the great content
Hey folks, one thing to add to this list is "Select All Idle Villagers" - sometimes, it's quicker to send all idles to do something while you're microing your army, then come back to balance your eco. Going through each idle takes too much time during a heated battle, so it's good situationally!
Shift+Period, but I think that's just all on screen and not globally (I could be wrong)
@@Casowsky Yeha you can set it to something easier so it's handy. Shift + Period is awful :D
Such high quality content as always - thanks SOTL
Few others I've found really helpful is the 'select all military units', this really helps if you are feudal rushing with a few units and want to select the reinforcements without jumping around the map. Also the 'idle military' key is great too. Works just like the idle villager key. Helps find them odd units in the corners of the map during a post imp trash war. 😁
The extra mouse button for all TC was really informative. Thanks.
Me, playing since the demo came out: Hot keys? 😬
Thank you! I wanted a video like this for years.
Spirit of the Law! you don't need to be so humble. These are great tips and I appreciate them. Thanks for the hard work!
Your content lately has been on 🔥🔥🔥
A recent thing I have picked up is control group your ship villagers when they reach 6. It makes dropping food off easier and shooting boar becomes that much simpler. You can also control group luring villager to help garrison him while luring.
"Select all x" building hotkeys are my favorite additions in DE actually. Seeing 1:16 made me realize that.
yeah, I feel so op, since I use it. especially for TCs; it feels like i just got 1300 just because i can boom better... i am awfull at mirco units 11
sounds really good to macro whilst microing
I haven’t played AOE in years but always enjoy watching your videos!!
Start playing again. It is so much better now, especially online play. The matchmaking system is great. You always get a good game with someone around your level (it takes about ten games to find your true Elo, ie level)
Gr8 video, the TC queueing trick is priceless, thank you! Suscribed
Didn't know about alt and last notification usage. Good tips overall. I also use tab for idle village as well :D
Thx a lot mannn.. Those were nice tips and tricks !!
After years of just looking the new remaster, I can finally play it
Tip Number 11: Just make random actions and track your apm, see apm rise, no problem!
How do you track apm?
i never understood why people do that... just seems extremely stressful and at times inefficient and nauseating. like repeatedly picking a town center > house > town center > blacksmith > town center in extremely quick succession. like why... whats the frekkin point!? people do this is starcraft as well and i just don't get it.
@@ZugzugZugzugson For many pros it is to warm their fingers up. In starcraft the game doesn't require as much thought in the early game so they spam hot keys to keep their fingers warmed up
Your channel helped me so much man, appreciate it
Thanks for the tips, hotkeys are really the most useful to learn I guess. When I play on Hard and have a great start, I always find my opponent to move on to the castle age first and also have an insane army while I'm still gathering stuff to advance, and making units prevent me from advancing.
you know you can pause right
For selecting units it's also good to know, that when you've already some units selected, that holding shift while clicking more units will add them to the list instead of deselecting the old ones. Can sometimes be helpful in cases, where your army is already out of view, but you still need to add newly generated units to a control group.
your videos are super valuable man, much obliged.
Oh wow. Go to last notification is MIDDLE MOUSE BUTTON? I just started getting back into the game and somehow space was ingrained into my brain. Great video! :D
Fend for thy self ye peasants! I done that so many times in the past! All hail the Alt key!
When you have 10 stables creating units, and you want to stop all production asap, is there a way to select all stables and stop the production of them all at the same time? Or do you have to select each stable one by one?
Besides the fact I was drawn back to AoE2 by Spirit as I Saw couple times in this comment section, I love how a lot of those tips I introduced to my gameplay on my own ^^ As a bonus I will add small tip that works for me - might not for others. I use mostly grid setup (most hotkeys resemble in game grid in a q-b square on keyboard) so building a barracks is q, arch range is w and stable is e. With that, making all barracks/ranges/stables is ctrl + q/w/e. The uiop that he uses as 'all' hotkeys I use as additional control groups. Mostly useless, but works miracles with monks.
This was very helpful, thank you.
This is a big help. If you add up all the seconds saved within a matter of 20min game play you could have added a total of 3mins of extra command activity...which is a major advantage
I woke up at 3:30am and couldn’t get back to sleep. This video did the trick, thanks Spirit 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
I wasn't sure about watching your videos, the logo made me think it was a 13 year old trying to explain things to me... I gave you a shot and i can't stop watching your videos, I'm very thankful for the tips you give in this video, they're so useful to me who played this game when i was 14 and I'm now re-discovering it (31).
I really like the “select land military units hotkey” the ones on screen. I set it to 1, It’s basically now group 1 = whatever military I can see. If like me you don’t use regular control groups well this is a great fast way to move your army.
Yep unless you have to retreat quickly bc the enemy is counter attacking hard and you just happen to have rams or monks or teutonic knights in your army, then everyone is going away slow 😂😂
@@borrell1482 true, my worst experience is when trebs are in the group and you can’t patrol/attack move
Great tips! Thank you SOTL
Really good as always!
Another use for ALT is to move over farm fields, target units surrounded by buildings and move closer to castles, Towers etc by making the target cursor ignore building (if you go on a building it becomes a move command)
5:57 For shift-clicking for building a wall, it's useful and I think the only way if you want your villager to go back to gathering a resource at the end.
Great useful tips and tricks!
When you have 10 stables creating units, and you want to stop all production asap, is there a way to select all stables and stop the production of them all at the same time? Or do you have to select each stable one by one?
Pls top comment!
A classic power move is to just demolish the lot of them. "bye bye barracks, I'll be dead before I need another spear anyways"
@@skipperkat123 Big brain move
@@skipperkat123 noice
Sadly no. This is one of the big qol features that the devs completely overlooked so far. No hotkey, can't do it from the global queue, just have to go through individual buildings and click.
Great vid as usual!
I'm surprised typing "aegis" into the chat didn't make the list
I see the comment to you Spirit of the Law, "I don't even playAOE2 anymore but i watch all your videos!" i see that as a perfect descriptor of your gift man, you are a born and engaging teacher! I only play against the AI since 1998 but I love your uploads, thanks!!
¿Rodelero? Ve mi vídeo "A conquistador refutes the 'Metatron' on Samurais VS Spaniards."
Great tips! im working on my keybinds now!
What a great video! Congratz!
Love your videos dude, Thanks!
There is also a "jump back to last screen" or something like that which you can use similar to the aelect all tc button. While raiding go back to your eco, add some farms and whatnot. Then just back right where you left your army. Or the other way around. You might not need it depending on the controll groups yiu are using. I found it quite helpfull despite using controll groups a lot.
Actually, this is my main problem with raiding. So thank you, this will help.
As a noob to AoE (DE) in general, I find this VERY helpful, but overwhelming at the same time as theres so much to remember. Theres far too many actions for the hotkeys as each unit/building has their own set to deal with. I love the game (II). I started off by playing AoE DE I but after playing for a while and beating it, I decided to see what the other ones were like and after having a play with all four, I really like II as it feels easier to play and the graphics are better, though I feel the zoom could be better as I would like the ability to zoom out much more to be able to see more as I'm not too fussed about seeing a battle or whatever really that close up that I can see the blood when someone gets killed by a knight or whatever.
thanks so much for this vid, will help a lot !
I've always played causally back in the initial days of OG Age of Kings, so I never developed much of a tempo of play. Fell out of playing for over a decade until I learned of your channel and the HD edition to get back into it. Still don't play consistently to keep a good pace, but at least started adapting things you've talked about to have a bit more haste and purpose in my building strategy.
Use my giant realistic maps.
Seriously, who the heck thumbs down these videos? The pros that don't want you to know these tricks? These are awesome vids.
a simple video that almost seems like secret information (at least for a newb like me : )). So great!!!
Changing the hotkeys to grid asap helps a lot. Many old school players never did and so use old hotkeys. Almost everything should make sense. I think at the end you've only got weird hotkeys for selecting all kreposts, or docks just because of their placement in the grid. Also maybe in some of the ships and dock upgrades because of the weirdness of docks making military and non military buildings on the same row. My delete key and idle are both f keys.
i started doing a lot of these when i was playing with my friends and we went up from 2k to 2.5k TR I also recommend people to add idle vill to ' key above tab, stables at C, techs from most important or left most to A, S, D, T, like A for clicking feudal, sdt for loom wheelbarrow and sfuff, or ballistics chemistry siege engineers, etc
Not me beating a friend who has been playing the game for years when I hadn't touched it in over a decade simply because SOTL keeps me up to date and has the best guides xDD Love this guy.
Hey SOLT you can also press Shift+ Ctrl+ any building hotkeys to select all of them. For example i use "S" for stable so if i press Shift+Ctrl+S i select all stable.. the only building that won't work is the TC, but for selecting all of the you just need to press Shift and the hotkey for the single TC.. thank you for the rest of the tips specially the " select only villagers" and how to remove specific unit from your controlled group.
I'd no idea Shift+C was a thing and thank you for this video!
Command queues are great except for when you have one or two villagers decide that walking around their coworkers to gather from a herdable is too much effort so they skip ahead to the next sheep on their own.
4:20 Tip: Can hold Alt and select all villagers, then continue holding Alt key + right click TC to garrison into TC
Thats exacly what I was looking for, thank you. What make a good player a pro, is knowing as many hot keys as possible. Eficiency is the secret.
A fresh SOTL video? I like it.
@Spirit of the Law - I noticed recently that the Vikings have a unique tech giving Inf bonus damage vs Cav. Would you consider looking into anti-cav bonuses (like “who has best halbs” or something) for a future video? Thanks dude, and I love your content!
I think he deals with the Chieftains unique tech in the Vikings overview video. Vikings don't get halberdiers, but the elite berserkers can trade cost-effectively against Frankish cavaliers if I recall correctly. Viking pikemen are still objectively better than the Aztec pikemen (Aztecs also don't get halberdiers) because Garland Wars only gives +4 attack (although it applies to all infantry and versus all armour classes, so it's much less situational). Chieftains gives +5 attack versus cavalry and +4 versus camels. Chieftains is also much cheaper. Viking infantry also get more HP. Both of them are worse versus cavalry than regular halberdiers though. Halbs get +32 bonus damage vs cavalry while pikemen only get +22. The best halberdiers are probably Slavic halbs. Druzhina gives them an area-of-attack damage (5 damage to each adjacent unit), which I think is easily the strongest bonus in big engagements. It falls off quickly as the number of units in the engagement diminishes. In general, I think the answer is "it depends". Other notable bonuses: Lithuanian spearmen are faster and benefit from Tower Shields (+2 pierce armor). Burmese halbs have +3 attack. Byzantine halbs are cheaper (-25%). Celts have faster halbs (+15%), but Celts don't get squires. Japanese halbs attack faster (33%). Tatar halbs get the factional hill bonus (+25%). Teuton halbs get more melee armour (up to +2). This kind of video would be pretty cool though. Without having made any experiments, I think the best halbs overall would be a toss-up between Slavs, Teutons and Japanese. The Burmese bonus isn't as good because halbs are pretty bad against anything that isn't a cavalry unit, and most of the damage they deal comes from the massive bonus damage and so the bonus really only comes into play when you have halb vs. halb fights and similar. Lithuanian and Byzantine halbs are also great for trash wars.
@@Infinite_Jester thanks for that! That’s a lot to look up 😁 I guess that means that my question is answered, though I agree - it’d still be interesting to see a dedicated video about this anyway
Remember when Spirit posted a video once every few months and it felt like he may just disappear any day? Yeah I still have nightmares lol.
The flashbacks... The shivers...
This is the most useful AoE video I've ever watched
Hi SotL, as a suggestion to your hotkeys, I use as "select all [certain production building, eg barracks]" the same hotkey as for the normal production building, except with "shift" stuck in front. :-) I use "a" for barracks, so it will be "shift+a" to select all my barracks. :-)
Same, really useful. You never need to go to barrack when you have only one barrack. The less screen movement you have the better you can focus!
Or remove the shift!! Just use a for all, barracks!! 🤣
@@whoami8247 Double-clicking "a" centres the screen to the (only existing) barracks. Especially helpful in the early game.
@@aoe2and3fan yeah but combat in early game happens at high elo.. I am at only 900-950 elo
Really good tips!
I am sure most people know this one already, but I only recently learned this: If you got raided and have many empty farms, you can just send all available villagers at one farm and they will spread out by themself. I dont know if that also works when creating new ones and just setting a farm as the waypoint, but i would think if the first one works, the second one might work too.
Is empty farm the expired farm or the one without any villager work on?
@@hnn.7699 i tried it on a farm with no villager on it, but i think it would work on an empty one too, but that never came up for me, its rare that the timing of a raid and an empty farm happen at the same time
Amazing! Great tips!
Concerning the "Go to the last notification" hotkey, it would be really nice to have the possibility of choosing what we want to be notified about, like not having one everytime a unit is made which is almost constantly the case post imp for example, would love to use this hotkey but can’t really most of the time because of this...
Ignore it in that case
great video, very helpful.