Microsoft's Sidewinder Strategic Commander

Spacesims are pretty much impossible to play without joysticks and side scrollers are difficult without a gamepad, but why can't strategy games have their own device? With games like Starcraft and, of course, the Age of Empires series topping the sales charts, Microsoft has gone after this large segment of the PC game market with their Sidewinder Strategic Commander. It is designed to keep strategy games focused more on strategy, and less on micromanagement.

Features:
The first thing you will notice when someone is using the Strategic Commander is that they also use the mouse. The strategic commander is not a pointing device. It has been designed to replace your keyboard in terms of how its used in strategy games, quickly performing actions with the use of hotkeys. The strategic commander has 6 buttons available for binding to keyboard or mouse commands. The 3 side buttons let you bind more functions to the 6 top buttons. By holding down a side button, you allow yourself access to 6 more top button bindings, giving you a total of 24 different commands you can have at your disposal (6 without pressing a side button plus 6 others each time you hold down a side button). If that wasn't enough, there is a switch that allows you to go between 3 different sets of these 24 commands giving you a grand total of 72 commands!

Now, if that was everything the strategic commander offered, it would just be a glorified macro binder, but it has some other cool features as well. It allows you to store your profiles for each game and swap between them easily. You can also send your profiles to your friends or clan mates, where they can use them as is, or modify them to their liking. One of the coolest features of the strategic commander is the ability to scroll the screen around without use of the mouse. Want to move your view over to the left? Just slide the SC over to the left and the screen moves, allowing you to concentrate your mouse on the work it is doing at the moment. For 3D games, you can twist the commander to the left and to the right, which rotates your viewpoint around the y-axis. Other benefits to 3D games are the 2 extra buttons on the top which allow for zooming in and out. You may never use the keyboard again! The best part is, that all these keys are bindable to whatever you want. If you don't need zoom, then you can switch it to something else for that particular profile.

For players who really want to get crazy with it, you can bind buttons on the fly easily using the recording feature. First, press record, second, press the button you want to bind to, third, press the buttons you want to be part of the binding, and fourth, press the record button again.

Ok, maybe you are a bit lost and don't know what binding is, or don't see much benefit in a device like this. Here is an example of the AOK profile that comes with the strategic commander and the actual buttons bound to each command:

• Button 1: "Build House with Idle Villager" Buttons Used: . V E
• Button 2: "Jump to Scout" Buttons Used: ALT-1
• Button 3: "New Villager" Buttons Used: 9 C 1 .
• Button 4: "Jump to Idle Villager" Buttons Used: .
• Button 5: "Jump Home" Buttons Used: H
• Other bound buttons include: "Turbo Start" and "Send Sheep Home"

The Turbo Start button is a neat little macro that gets you going right away. Here is the description that comes with the Turbo Profile:

This is an expert profile. Expert profiles are designed for hard-core competitive players who are looking for ways to improve their game. Using an expert profile is a great way to get more ideas on how to create your own perfect profile.

Turbo Start is designed to get your economy screaming along while giving you maximum scout usage in the early game.

At the very beginning of the game use the Turbo Start command to set up your display options, queue 4 villagers, set your town center to 9, your scout to 1, and select the first idle villager to build a house.

Now use Build House with Idle Villager twice to create two more houses with your other starting villagers.

Use Jump to Scout to quickly select your scout. Use Jump Home to quickly get back to your town center to fix your villagers. Use New Villager to order a new villager without disturbing your scouting.

To use Send Sheep Home, select the sheep, move your mouse to the middle of the screen and press the command. This command uses group 5.

Micro-manage your scout to explore most efficiently. When your town center needs attention, set 3-4 waypoints for your scout, Jump Home, rearrange things, and then Jump to Scout to pick up where you left off.

Advanced Tips:

Build villager is actually 9 C 1 - add a period to the end of this command to ensure that you never have idle villagers slacking. Adding a period to the end of Jump to Scout (Alt + 1 .) will give you even more protection against idle villagers.

Author: Sidewinder Team

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