In Red Alert 3 you can get more efficiency out of your units by controlling them well. When properly controlled, your army can kill more enemy units and lose less of your own than would have been the case if you just sent your army in and hoped for the best.
This tip of the week include some general pointers on the control of your army.
Sometimes in the heat of battle, you need to be watching what is going on as well as reinforcing your army on the fly. This can get tricky, especially if you need to move you view back over to your base to collect newly built units, or if you need to only have certain unit types in your army move forward to counter your enemy.
1) W selects all matching units on screen.
For example, we want to select all of the bears and hammer tanks in a group of units, not just the few that you can box select without grabbing other units as well. Pressing w after selecting any number of any type of unit will select all of the units on the screen that match those that you has selected in the first place.
Similarly, double pressing w selects all matching units on the whole of the map, which is perfect for grouping up scattered tanks, aircraft and infantry when your army gets split up, or for when something new is built from a production structure and you want to get hold of it as soon as possible without actually moving over to your base whilst controlling your army.
2) Formation move with jet type units
Pressing down on left and right click simultaneously allows for formations of units to be set up. This is all well and good for ground units and is relatively easy to use. However, aircraft can be a little more tricky, as they don't line up as you would expect.
Supposing we want these Apollo jets lined up so that they are all facing in the right direction in a line over the spot that they are in now
3) Using X for scattering your units
Pressing X when some units are selected makes each unit move outwards from the centre of the group. This can be useful early game to spilt up dogs and bears so that they don't get roar/barked all at once, or mid-game to avoid the classic "timebomb with surgical strike" usage:
4) Tab selecting units for secondary usage
With a whole group of units selected, you can use "tab" to move though the units that you are in control of at that time, allowing you to individually use secondary abilities on specific units. For example, this can be used to have specifically damaged tsunami tanks use their secondary to become more sturdy whilst taking enemy fire, on low health hammer tanks to change into their secondary "leech beam" without losing the selection on all of your other units or to only select that one guardian tank to change into laser painter mode.
