How to setup your hotkeys for Casual Gamers

Hotkeys are not work. Hotkeys can improve the fun you have playing this game (also improving your performance). Its all about Quality of life.

I have a setup, which requires next to no hand movement- while still retaining all important functionality. (German Keyboard, dunno if this is relevant) The Hand is set with the fingers at QWER and the thumb beeing able to access space and "ALT" key. Every Unit type has only a few important "abilities" which are actually worth a hotkey; e.g.

Military units have :

Q- Patrol /attack ground (whichever you use)

W- Flank Formation (for the Archer/mangonel minigame)

E- Line Formation (Archer/Mangonel Minigame)

R- Attack Ground

You can bind additional functions to the Alt+QWER hotkeys, as Alt is easily accessible with your thumb (if you cant live without a "box formation" or "follow that unit" hotkey or whatever)

Villagers:

I use the default hotkeys for Villagers (QQ house, QA farm, WS Palisade) although i can see the benefit of switching to WW Palisade, since you never have to quickly drop an archery range

I use "space key" for "select all TC"

CTRL groups 1,2 and 3 I use for army; control groups 4,5,6 I use for production buildings.

QWER covers the production of the units; i guess you could switch up "Shift+QWER" into "Alt+QWER" for the "train 5 units" function (but i do fine without)

I have "Select idle Military" on "Mouse extra button 1", because i dont want to screen the map to find those three lazy knights guarding my allies TC since min 20....

The most important role of hotkeys is to reduce the amount of time and attention you have to put in tedious and boring aspects of the game as placing 20 farms/houses, and letting you actually enjoy the real game more. Games should be fun not work. And since you are playing aoe2 and not some farming simulator i assume you want to spend your time leading your armies and not... placing farms.