Phew, enough of that unit selection stuff already! Here's some other cool
in-game stuff…
You can hold down 'control' when your cursor is over an allied or neutral
unit to force an attack.
You can hold 'shift' when your cursor is over one of your buildings, and
if it can be selected as 'primary' then you will get a nice little cursor,
and if you click then it will become the primary facility. (The alternative
is 'double left click' but ya don't get the nice little cursor thingy ;)
Holding down 'control' when unloading units from a transporter or a
building will spit them out one at a time. (Fill that tunneller up with spies
and drop one off in each of your enemies' bases!)
You can 'shift-left-click' on the mini-map to force a jump to that
location whether you have a unit selected or not. (Normally if you have units
selected you will order them to move to that location.)
This one's essential - you can use the keypad number keys as shortcuts to
the 'behaviour' settings in the Orders menu. They correspond directly with
what is shown on the screen (switch to the orders menu, select a unit, and
try it). You don't have to be in the orders menu to use them, so in the
middle of a battle you can grab a heap of units and hit the '3' key to set a
high independence for all of them.
There's something else you can do with the keypad (sorry notebook users,
but hey, we were running out of keys ok!!). They can be used as a custom
map-bookmark system. Here's the run down - scroll to somewhere on the
screen that you want to be able to jump to quickly - then hit 'ctrl-#' where
# is any of the keypad number keys. That location is now saved with that key,
and when you hit 'shift-#' your view will jump back to that saved location.
(The keypad is especially cool 'cause you can associate keys with their
relative map positions, for example, '7' is 'top left' and '5' is 'middle'.)
The combination 'Alt-F2' saves the game 'quick.sav' and is loaded using
'Alt-F3'. These are strictly quick shortcuts that were put in at the last
minute, there are no nice dialog boxes or anything.
When you're desperate for cash, you can click on either the 'credit
display window' or the 'water bar' to force a water launch. This does the
same thing as 'shift-L', so check it out in your manual.
If you've really gotta quit quickly, and you don't have time to click on
the 'Menu' tab, you can hit 'ctrl-shift-Q' to exit directly to the operating
system. (Whew, was that your boss?)
This one might be in the manual, but it wasn't in the 'help.txt' file.
When you are using 'groups', hitting 'shift-group#' selects that group, and
jumps the view to above the first selected unit.
Hmm, nothing you can really get from these, but what the hell. To turn on
some debug info, including frame rate, hit 'ctrl-shift-/'. To see some
network stats, hit 'ctrl-shift-\'.
You can hit the 'U' key when you have a building selected to upgrade it.
(Same as clicking the 'upgrade' button, but for those speed freaks!)
Hitting 'V' displays your version string. This was mainly used during
development, but we thought we might as well leave it in there.
I saw this in the 'help.txt' file, but it was slightly incorrect. The
'END' key sets the cluster location for repair and rearm facilities. This is
the point to which units in a queue move before they get repaired - and only
if the queue is quite full. This can be useful if you have a lot of
units queuing up in a location that could be dangerous (for example - on the
wrong side of your enormous line of guard towers!)
A number of people have asked us about the 'space' bar and what 'last game
event' means. To be brief - there are these things called 'game messages'
(configured in gamemsg.txt) and a large number of them are triggered with an
associated 'x,y' map position. Hitting the space bar jumps you to the
location of the last game message that was triggered with an 'x,y' position.
An example of this is when the lovely calm computer voice says 'Enemy
engaged' - you hit 'space' and your view jumps to the location of the battle.
Of course, all your units may get blasted off the planet, and your view will
be stuck in the middle of nowhere. So hit 'space' again, and the view will
jump back to the position you came from. Neat eh!
One last thing for serious users only! If you hit 'ctrl-shift-c' during
the game, the game message with the symbol "TESTBLweP" will be triggered at
the current mouse position. If you're configuring scenario specific game
messages, you may want to use it for testing - especially if your game
messages are end-condition dependent, and only happen when you've played for
an hour!
Config Stuff
These are some things to do with the file 'tactics.cfg' which is in the
same directory as dkreign.exe.
In the 'EngineSetup' section you can set the variable 'SoundCache'. This
is the maximum amount of ram that will be used to cache sound effects off
your hard disk. You can change this to a higher value if you have lots of
ram, and you may get better performance (especially if your hard drive is
dead slow!).
The following are in the 'UserPreferences' section.
'DefaultFire' and 'DefaultMove' determine whether the interface will
automatically change into move and fire mode when you have units selected.
'InfoDelay' sets the number of milliseconds before the 'tool tips' etc
appear. If they bug you, then set this higher. If you hate waiting for em,
crank it down!
'EnablePanning' is something that went in at the last minute and we
didn't want to upset anyone by making it the default. It turns on stereo
panning of location based sound effects. So when your tank gets blasted just
off the left of your screen, you will hear it in the left speaker. This is
probably best with headphones.
'EnableAdvanced' was another one that went in at the very last minute. If
it is equal to '1' then the 'Orders' and 'Paths' menus will be in their
advanced states when you enter the game.
That's all we can think of for now, that should keep you busy for a
while! One last thing, if you're really keen, have a really bad memory, and
have no paper left in your printer! - you can edit the file 'help.txt' in the
..\dark\local directory and add in any extra things you want to remember, and
you can see it all by hitting the 'F1' key during your game.
Enjoy Dark Reign!