Centring the Town Hall

Command Centre

I didn’t have the habit to centre my Command Centre to the middle of the screen, but I think there are benefits in doing so. This is something I will add to my game play, and you should too.

Camera hot key and centring

It is important to use camera hot keys to move around the bases. If you don’t, you definitely should.

As you move to different bases using your camera hot key, it is more convenient to have each of those town hall to be at the same location of the screen. The best way to ensure they are in the same location is to have them in the middle of the screen. This allows you be more efficient with the mouse movement than having the multiple town halls at different locations of the screen. When I say they are at different locations, they are still close to the middle but not exactly middle.

I will use INnoVation as the example, because, in my opinion and many others’ as well, he has the most crisp clean mechanics. If you watch INnoVation’s FPV, you may have noticed that his Command Centre are positioned in the middle of the screen and the mouse cursor does not move away from the middle more than necessary. This is because it gives you the optimal mouse cursor travel distance around the screen.

By default, the town hall is not centred when the game starts. So if you set camera hot key right from the start, it is not in the middle.

screen1Default

screen3Centred

Another problem is the general habit that players will set camera hot key at the start of the game for the expansions they plan to take as the game progresses. However, the hot key-ed location is not aligned to be perfectly in the middle for the yet-to-build town hall.

screen2Pre-set hot key location

screen4Pre-set hot key location with the town hall

Another words, you need to set the camera hot key again once the town hall has been placed in the expansion in order to ensure it is in the middle.

I overlap the images of three bases into one image to show the difference between centring and without centring. The difference is quite obvious.

screen5Centred

screen6Without centred

Why centre the town hall

By centring the town hall to the middle of the screen, the mineral patches and gas geysers at the different bases have the similar distance to the middle of the screen or the respective town halls. Consequently, you develop a muscle memory of how far these important peripherals are from your default mouse cursor location, which is the middle. This allows you to macro more efficiently, and handle various situations better. For example, you want to drag your works away from the mineral line against a drop.

This is even more important for Zerg players as they want to cycle the different bases for larva injection.

How to centre

1. Double clicking the selection hot key.

First, group the building or the unit with a group hot key (e.g., Ctrl + 1). Then, double click the selected group hot key (double click 1).

2. Click on the image at the command bar.

Untitled-4

3. Ctrl + f

I was asking around to see if there are other ways that I’m not aware off, and Juno has the below suggestion. I’ve yet to try it out myself.

Untitled-6

10 thoughts on “Centring the Town Hall

  1. I used to do this, however there are some maps where you are unable to center the camera on the command center because it is too close to the edge of the map. Also sometimes you get a better field of view of the base location if you don’t center on the command center.

  2. Good point. I am using camera hotkeys for quite a while now and I guarantee you, you will profit from it after a while.
    Even so, I almost never go over F1-F4 because after that I am not able to reach my F5 key efficiently.

  3. In Jakataks “The Core” hotkey layout the create camera hotkey modifier is also bound to center on location. To set locations in the beginning of the game you just hold the create camera key (in this case alt) down as it won’t keep jumping to the thing you have selected.

    There are also two or three free cameras that you can set wherever you want that use a different create camera modifier.

  4. I used to play Zerg so my injecting method was the “backspace method”, the centering is done by pressing the backspace (or in my case, spacebar) key, not with F1-F4 or double clicking.

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