Age of Empires Hotkey Science

Just trying to develop my optimal hotkeys

What are My Values

• I need to be able to find my idle millitary units quickly
• I need to be able to find my idle villagers units quickly
• I need to be able to build buildings quickly here are my priorities
  • house
  • farm
  • town center
  • lumber camp
  • pallisades
  • walls
  • pallisade gate
  • gate
  • barracks
  • stable
  • archery range
  • siege workshop
  • castle
• I need to be able to change the arrangement of my units quickly. I also need to be able to change how aggressive they are quickly
• I need to be able to produce units quickly especially the ones I like to use the most
• I don't need to mirror the layout of the buttons on screen to match the position of the keys on the keyboard

What Keys I Have to Work With

Since my right hand is on the mouse in the game I only have the left half of the keyboard to work with. Since I can still reach shift, alt and ctrl with my thumb I can unlock additional 3 layers as variations of these keys.

This leaves me with the following layout to use:

x	v	l	c	w
u	i	a	e	o
ü	ö	ä	p	z

These are 15 keys and they can be re-used with a modifier 3 more times for a sum of 60 possible bindings.

I seem to favor the right most keys of this layout the most but not the last keys to the right because I have to move my fingers from the home row to reach them. So my most important keys should be to the right but not in the last column.

The Hotkeys

Unit

Build

Build (Ctrl Modifier)

Go to (Alt Modifier)