A nice suggestion when you use offline cheats, is instead of making your self richer, you make it more difficult for yourself. By this you will have a better opponent and a more satisfactory game. I find this a handy way for training for multiplayer games. Since the AI isnt so very strong after all on very hard. It keeps on making the same silly mistakes, due to knowing better. So what can you do about it. Type www and control +P. This will give u a box with colors on the right side of the screen. Select one of your opponents colors. Start of with typing a few times money to give him more resources. Pick a few peasants and build a few new buildings aswell. After they build it , they will resume what they were doing. Pump out as much units as you like. Then change back to your color. The AI will use theseunits against you.
It also an illusion to think that the online play cheat free is. However the cheats are not so commonly known. Its also important to make a distinction between cheats and bugs.
For those people among you who think its important to have the most points or cheaters, here is a thought:
" How important is a virtual classification and given value towards a player worth knowing that this is an imaginary value given out by a manufacturer of a cartoon game." .(Retorical Question)
Famous example is version 1.29 ( The Art of War) where you could build several diplomatic centers. All you needed to do was click fast enough and have the resources for it. Another example was the "orange" cheat. If one paused the game while playing with orange, any buildings constructed all costed the same price. Clearly a cheat if you used this knowingly.
A less know example but rather crazy cheat was the "Victoria" cheat. If you builded 9 victoria's, the price for the next one was not deducted from your resources but added to it. The icon actually showed something like -1 783 728. This meant over a million was added to your resources. You could easily make up to 100 Victoria's in one harbour and therefore receiving hundreds of millions of resources. Simply crazy. Fun though for a big seawar :-)
Some of these bugs where adressed in patches, such as 1.30 version. However, its far from perfect.
The most striking to me was this one. In a game I suddenly noticed after pressing control +A that i had a peasant of the enemy. This was a game without capture. So i wondered, where that peasant was. I selected him and found out that he was in the middle of the towncenter of my enemy ignored by all enemy units.. I tried to move him but without result. But i was able to lay down the foundations of all buildings straight away. Ok, now you know that you have to build a blacksmith before you can build barracks. So this was simply impossible to me. I'm just writing this here so if somebody does it against you, you know what your up against.
Another issue : Just have a look at the top 100 list in the gamespy shell. Especially the top 10 today. Nr 1. after having had a look at his profile, you can clearly see that most of the games in his records, are the same game on the same date at the same hour with the same players. Now how's that for a cheat? It actually gives that player points for every logged record. This is caused by an vulnerability in the cew.dll file in Cossacks. With knowdledge of this file you can exploit this. There's a second way aswell to exploit the rankings but i will not go in to either of these issues since it only will create more exploits.
Some of the "bugs" I already mentionned in the online cheats. Here I got some more "bugs" that have been "legalized" by the players.
- Making formations with fishboats: if you select a few fishboats and then units on land toghether, then right click and align them on the map. The units will spread out in a very broad scatter formations. This is very handy for artillery games.
- Cannons and certain units, such as the mercenary dragoon or 18th Frigate build for the same cheap price if you pause or click fast enough.
Another example of cheating would be to set up a score game. Meaning the highest score wins after a specified time. Some players make a sport out of it to make lots of crap units like 18th pikes and hussars and then disconnect, and win by default due to higher score.