Cheat Engine Xcom Long War
Viviano Dean
Quick save and load mechanism allows also safe dashing scouting of map. Quick save before any movement and load if aliens encountered for optimal placing or to unawaken any extra alien groups encountered.
Not Created Equally Second Wave option creates another nice exploit. When you have no shortage of funds (later in game or with fund cheat), you can farm for high stat level soldiers. Simpy recruit full batch and when they arrive, immediately fire all Rookies who have less than 50 Will and 70 Aim and when you have 10+ of these, start firing all Rookies who have less than 50 Will and 75 Aim. Again when you have 10+ of these, start firing everything with less than 50 Will and 80 Aim and last when you have Iron Will and New Guy unlocked, start recruiting only Squaddies with 80 base Aim (for Squaddies meaning 82 Heavy, 85 Assault and Support, 90 Sniper) and 60+ Will (can go as high as 68 for Iron Will Squaddies).
This will hugely help your late game as you get usually one or two 80 aim and 50+ will soldiers per recruiting cycle (3 days) and 80 aim means +15 increase from the basic 65 aim that equals 1.5 S.C.O.P.Es. This means that your Assaults can snipe enemies from longer distances even with shotguns, Snipers basically never miss and your Heavies can actually hit something. Also training Squaddies is actually much easier when you don't need to babysit them as much, them being able to hit enemies from medium distances with reasonable certainity and high Will means they won't panic immediately when fired upon, taking slight damage or even if somebody is killed next to them. Later game with Iron Will and this recruiting method you will guarantee all your soldiers have over 100 Will and thus very high chances of being Psions and being very hard to control when facing enemy Psionics.
This exploit relies on how getting items from a mission works. Basically: you get the alien weapons by default, and when the alien dies the weapon changes to be weapon fragments; conversely, you get the alien corpse by default, and when you use the Arc Thrower it changes to be a live capture--likewise the Arc Thrower attack causes the Outsider Shard to come into existence.
The catch is that the alien dying is part of the script for them taking damage, i.e. the script for causing the aliens to die and their weapons to be destroyed is part of the weapon damage routines, not an inherent property of the alien class.
Rather having 0 HP causes the alien to stop moving and the game to identify it as 'alien corpse.' So if an alien using Mind Merge or Mind Control hits 0 HP without being hit by anything, the game will classify them as dead, but the mind control/merge effect won't end, and the other alien won't take damage; as that is part of the dying routine.
The other factor that's important here is that the game seems to count 'HP' and 'damage,' rather than 'total HP' and 'current HP.' e.g. if a Sectoid has 1 hp remaining, then internally it has 4 'HP' and 3 'damage.' Meaning that if the difficulty setting changes from a setting where a Sectoid has 4 'HP' and 3 'damage' to a setting where it has 3 'HP', it will still have 3 'damage' and it's HP will be 0 without it having been hurt.
Cheat Engine allows easy hacking of funds and other resources. After loading your game, use Cheat Engine to select the Xcom process, check your amount of funds and search for that value with Cheat Engine. Then spend some funds and search again for the new value and you should find the right memory location. If your search gives you more than one result, buy or sell something to change the value and search again. Once you have found the right memory location you can edit the value to whatever you want.
The same thing works with Alien Power Sources, Weapon Fragments, Alloys, Meld, Alien Corpses etc. Easiest way to change their amount is selling one or few in the Gray Market. With some practice, it is possible to find the memory offset with as few as two units of the wanted item by changing the sell amount in Gray Market without actually selling searching for the inventory value, but it is far easier to find items in memory if you have at least three of them.
Always remember that changing the wrong memory offset may have disastrous results for game stability and may corrupt the game, so always save the game before editing any values. Also, when you change values in the memory, test you found the right one by refreshing the game values (moving out and in from Gray Market for example) and if you didn't, simply reload the game and search the memory again instead of taking the risk of changing something that may corrupt the game from playthrough.
I've known people who've run cheat engines on games they bought through steam and nothing ever happened. I think unless a game is running the VAC software or some other anti-cheating software (punkbuster etc) then you should be fine. And that software usually runs on the server you connect to to play the game.
If the game does have VAC, you can launch the game in -insecure mode, and can use cheat engine that way and you won't be VAC banned. The only issue is that you won't be able to connect to VAC secured servers. That's it. The vast majority of single player game do not have anti-cheat systems.
@ravingham91: Here's a list. You search the steam store with "Valve Anti-Cheat enabled" and it'll return any game with it. You can click on "single player" as well to lower the number down. Keep in mind though that single player games with mutliplayer will show up on that list if they have VAC.
@t_wester: I've had a mini heart attack or two back when I used to play WoW and I'd forget to close cheatengine and have the game warn me about it. Thankfully they don't instaban you or anything, they pretty much just go "hey...close the cheat program before you log in will ya."
Yes it is fine. Cheat Engine with multiplayer only games is messed up. But single player is ok. Used it to power through a replay of SR3 and towards the end of SR4 when I was sick of collecting the orbs but wanted to max everything I just gave myself like a few hundred to unlock all abilities. Also gave myself a bunch of money in XCOM on a second playthrough so I wouldn't have to worry about that system.
I personally try to only use CE on replays but some games for me push me to use it. I really want to play the Half-life games for the story and setting, but hated the combat in 1, so I'm debating on just giving myself infinite ammo and health and just bum rushing through the game.
Yeah, I have a friend... __> .... who has used a cheat engine before with games from steam, and he didn't have any issues. Just make sure that you only do it for single player games, or in single player mode.
@t_wester: Its been a couple years but I thought I tried to find codes and was unable to. I was more inept with PC games back then and probably just missed them when I searched but I'll give it another shot. About damn time I play those games and become a crazed HL3 supporter (maybe).
My dad uses a hex editor/cheat engine all the time on games through steam. He never play multiplayer and so its a what ever situation. He has been playing Resident evil remake hd and got so sick of Ribbons as he needs to save as of when he feels too sore or tired (58 year old man who has just had major surgery kinda needs to stop when he can) so he cheated himself 99 save ribbons so he can save as often as he likes.
I've used Cheat Engine for years on steam games and am still in good standing with VAC. Although, I've never used it with games where it would be a problem to use it on, i.e. multiplayer games. From my experience, it seems fine to use as long as you don't use in games where it might impact other players. Also, in most cases, Cheat Engine wouldn't even work in multi games where values are checked server-side for validation. The user values would likely be ignored and immediately revert to the actual one according to the server.
Don't just remember to close the program, also make sure the process isn't running in the Windows Task Manager (sometimes programs crash during exit, keeping their processes running), since VAC looks for cheat programs in memory.
Also, I think stuff like PunkBuster (which isn't as widely used these days as it used to be) also checks for installed programs, not only running ones, so it could have issues with Cheat Engine even if you aren't using it at the moment.
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