OK, so for anyone interested in this, here is a bit more detailed description:
The situation: there are elements that were placed in a certain order and so their Element IDs were assigned accordingly. You want to change these element IDs by selecting the elements one by one and you want the IDs to be assigned to them in the order they were selected.
For this to work make sure that there is no criteria in the Selected Criteria field. If there are no criteria the new IDs will be assigned in the order the elements were selected.
However, if there are any criteria, the IDs will be assigned in the order resulting from the Criteria.
Thus if you have "Element ID" as criteria, then ARCHICAD will take the Element IDs of all selected elements, arrange them in a list internally, and then assign the increasing IDs based on that list. In our example, the originally assigned IDs were increasing from LEFT to RIGHT, so that is the order in which the Element ID criteria will put them and the new IDs will be assigned to them in that order. Thus the Element ID criterion defines the order in which the new IDs are assigned and not the order the elements were selected. This is why you need the Selected Criteria field to be empty so the selection order will define the order in which new IDs are assigned.
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