If I have a group of siege tanks selected, say 8, and I want to put them into siege mode, will i have to press the hotkey 8 times or once?

As already mentioned in this thread, you’ll have to press the key only once and all the siege tanks will go in siege mode.
Some other examples, just to clarify things up:

Stalker’s Blink, Zerg’s Burrow, Battle cruiser’s Defensive Matrix, Baneling’s Explode, Viking’s switching from air-mode to ground-mode: you’ll only have to press the key once to trigger the ability for all the selected units at once (be careful with those Banelings!)

High Templar’s Psi Storm, Disruptor’s Force Field, Zerg’s mutations (Zerglings to Banelings, etc.): smart casting will kick in here and you’ll have to press the key for every selected unit.

@Crazy_dave
At the moment there's no friendly fire associated to the Explode ability.
The baneling explode exactly when you press the key, no targeting needed, no delay.

Yes, we've been following the thread you're referring to and we're quite interested in the discussion going on there.
I suggest you to continue posting your suggestions because your opinion matters to us, even if we don't always reply to every single thread.


@Phase_tn
Here's one occasion where I think you might need smart casting. Let's assume you have 20 Zerglings currently selected, you don't have a lot of vespene gas and you feel the need for 5 or so Banelings. Without smart casting you'll have to manually select 5 of these little dodgy creatures and then morph them, or else you'll be mutating all of the 20 Zerglings into Banelings (and deplete your vespene reserves in the meanwhile).
With smart casting on the other hand you'll be able to mutate 5 of them in a matter of seconds without deselecting them, just by pressing the key 5 times in a row.


Obviously this is just an example, but I feel that smart casting has a role to play here.