After playing with these hotkeys for one day (only one ladder game however, I'm a wimp) I've made quite a few changes.
I played with the setup I had yesterday for a bunch of custom games vs the AI to see how it felt. Overall I liked it. I then played one ladder game with it and lost due to being out of practice (at least not due to the keys!). I then I played two custom games with my old key bindings. Immediately a bunch of things stuck out.
Space for Base Camera
I'm going to try and make this my main key to spam when looking for things to do. This is the only way to see how my hatcheries are doing as far as injects. I love having all of my queens on one hotkey again (wasn't doing this for a little while) but this leads to not being able to inject which isn't very good.
Unit Control Groups
Going back to 1-6 for units with A as attack felt COMPLETELY natural so basically I decided that I shouldn't change this. Unit groups being 1-6 and A being attack will stay no matter what. This morning I even tried making S, D and F control groups for units and this felt wrong as well.
Custom control groups for buildings
This aspect was something I immediately missed when going back to standard keys. Using control groups 5-7 for buildings immediately felt very wrong! This told me I was on the right track.
Using this data I tried some more stuff out this morning. I've ended up deciding that I want three custom control groups. One for macroing and then 3 more for production. After multiple trials I've settled on Q for macro (loved this from yesterday) and T, G and B for production. F for production was too useful for units/abilities and didn't leave a lot of space for the other two groups. If I made R and V control groups as well I was left with almost NO space at all... not good!
I also figured out (this morning) that I didn't like putting keys to the right of these production hotkeys for anything. I didn't like having to move my hand to macro AND use abilities so that was scratched quickly. I did however want to use more camera locations. I've settled on Tab with Y,H and N to be camera locations (as well as F1-F4). Tab will be my main base. This is where I go to build buildings and stuff like that. This provides a easy hotkey to return to home and provides Tab-Q to immediately go home and select Queens, or go home and select my town hall for other races. From then W does creep/build workers and E does my macro ability (chrono, inject or mule). I'm going to make Y,H and N be other camera locations with the idea being I can quicklky hit GH to select a production building and then focus on it. For Protoss I will make H go to my warp in location since I already have a notification that my warp in is ready (the icon on the screen). For other races H will focus on the barracks that are grouped to G. For zerg H will be my rally location for units so I can quickly go "GH", hit the hotkey for the unit I want to make and then select new units that are coming out. Simular stuff will happen for TY and BN.
Abilities
I did love using WE for abilities on units so I'm keeping that and seeing how it feels in big battles. R is stance changing. For zerg this is ALWAYS burron on all of the units and it's also the key for moving my crawlers. For tanks R is siege/unsiege and cloak. I make sure that R is always the key to train cloak and siege as well. Anytime a unit morphs that hotkey is V (hatchery, spire, ling, overlord, corrupter). V is also always upgrade buildings (evolution, forge, engineering bay etc). Building normal building is always W and advance is E. I then try to keep buildings semi simular across races. W is town hall, E is gas, R is supply (roach warren for zerg). S is rax/gateway/pool. F is always turret/spore and C is bunker/spine. Cannons for Toss are F and C.
Production
For zerg selecting hatcheries will always be T, G or B and units are as follows:
- D: Drone
- Z: Ling
- A: Overlord
- R: Roach
- E: Hydra
- F: Infestor
- X: Muta
- C: Corruptor
- W: Ultra
- S: Select Larva
When I can I keep the building that allows for these units to be the same key (roach, infestor, hydra, ultra, etc)
I follow simular strats with Toss and Terran but try to keep the keys close to the building control group. Robo and Factory use Z,X,C and V for production for example. For Terran I have W and E do tech lab and reactor so my Starport hotkeys are A,S,D,F and R.
Notes
I moved Stop, Hold Position and Patrol to X, C and Z respectively. The best part about this is my early game spam. I constantly hit GSD as zerg now (to build drones) and none of these keys are abilities of the drone so spamming can't cause me to stop them (since stop is changed). I havn't tried this for toss/terran yet. I know I'll be hitting Tab-Q a lot on them so hopefully the same thing applys. I'll hopefully find anyother bad key overloads soon and change them.
I know this has been a long post but it was very interesting to me how returning to normal keys immediately told me which changes were good and which were bad. I hope the camera/control groups pairs prove helpful!