Cheating & Bugs

As most games, this one doesn't  escape from it.

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)


Offline Codes:
 
Press Enter and type:
 
money : will give you 50 000 of each resource
VICTORY: will win the current game
izmena: will allow you to select other colors of players
supervizor: will disable/enable fog of war
multivar: will enable to select units after pressing P
www: will activate last 3 codes
 
 
change: will change the nation colour of the selected unit, eg; change 0 1 ( will change the selected unit from nation colour 0 to 1)
changeunit:will change the selected unit(formation) in to the defined unit ( eg, select a squad of pikes and type: changeunit Mushketer(au). You will need to know the internal unit name's, though there are lists in game to research these.
ntch: unknown atm

 
There are a few cheats out on cossacks which can be seen as bugs aswell. However, because you have to use these bugs intentionally to have them to have effect, this means they are cheats. For a good definition of cheating would be: "Intentionally making use of a bug/ cheat in game to gain an unfair advantage in the game".
A mod is not a cheat aslong as both players have the same version.

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.

There are aswell programms around that enable you for example to make 50 dragoons in one time in the diplo with one click. Pomor®Russians playersTM  ;-)
This is one tool I will not include on this site.

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.

If you have read the Multiplayer section on this site, then you should have seen that it takes a lot of games to reach 200 000 points. The game probably hasn't been out long enough to even reach such a score. Another example is the player with 251 games and 250 games won. Hey?? Yeah right
 

 

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.
  • Multibarrels cannons produce more then limit of art depots if put on continously. In some cases you will get an extra cannon out of the depot.
  • 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.
  • A wall will be 'thrown' [explode] if it is incomplete and an enemy soldier is near it. In exploding it will cause the section left and right of it to also explode.
  • A mine can be captured if the soldiers guarding it stray off chasing after an archer and another enemy than approaches at the right time
  • A few grenadiers can and always will be able to destroy walls in few throws. 18c grenadiers fully upgraded do this easily.
  • Drummers:an easy way to fight russia's pikes, if you are poland for example is making out of one of your barracks constantly drummers. They have a cheap upgrade for +20 defense and even a huge formation of pikemen need a lot of time to kill 50 - 100 drummers. Long enough to be shot down by a few dragoons. This is ofcourse the grey line between a bug and trixx. I dont believe the game was made to make 100 drummers. Cause i dont believe one can make 100 formations in a game. Still, good tactic 

Other persistent and annoying bugs:
  
If you put soldiers in a ferry and while they are travelling towards the ferry you immediately click on nearby soldiers to go inside the ferry aswell, the last one's who arrive will go berserk and go straight trough your ferry and walk on water. Yes that's right. Now if you think its over , think again, if the game has capture on, and those soldiers that are walking over water might end up on an enemie's island if its in their route to the edge of the map. Any buildings/units that are unguarded will be captured and there is no way of killing these buggers. They will continue their path and capture anything on their way.
  
A cheater is someone who does not follow the rules said by the host at the beginning of the game. If for some reason the host forgot to mention a rule, and a player "violates" against it, then this is not cheating. Also considered cheating is the intentional use of any means to gain an unfair advantage over the enemy. Some players find 3 vs1 very unfair. However if you agree to play FFA ( free for all) then this is not a cheat.

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.

Pay attention aswell to the score and peace time settings. You dont want to play 60 minutes pt and only 30 minutes score.( Funny, yeah, but it happened to me)