Help me build a trainer for Empire: Total War!

March 13, 2009 11:24 AM

I love Empire: Total War, but I'm completely disheartened by the lack of cheats! I've used Cheat-o-Matic to give myself unlimited money, but I'd really like instant unit creation and a way to unlock technologies. Is there a trial-and-error way of doing this? How would I go about doing this?

Usually there are trainers out there for this kind of thing, but the only one I have found is a paid thing. For technology and instant unit creation, how would I go about this? I'm sure there's some sort of general methodology that revolves around guess and checking, right? What tools would I need? Any general pointers on this kind of thing?

posted by geoff. to computers & internet (3 comments total)

I haven't done any game memory hacking in a while, so I don't know what specific tools you'll need, but basically you want to get a slightly more sophisticated version of a Cheat-o-Matic type tool. Cheat-o-Matic only works for things that you know the exact value of, but other tools will let you just specify that a value has changed, gotten bigger, stayed the same, etc. in between scans.

I'm not sure about the details of unit creation and technology unlocking, but basically you'll want to figure out what value the game is storing that you want to change, and then rescan over and over again until the tool can narrow down the list of possible memory locations. For technology unlocking, you'll probably have to scan a bunch of times with a certain technology locked and unlocked, which should eventually lead to a memory location that contains the locked/unlocked value. For unit creation, it might be trickier. If the game uses some sort of timer value to keep track of how long it needs to wait before creating a unit, you can probably find it by searching for a value that decreases steadily until the unit is created.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:10 PM on March 13

Googles shows several trainers, free and paid. Have you tried any of those?
posted by wongcorgi at 1:57 PM on March 13

The only free trainers are for money, which is easy to hack with cheat-o-matic.
posted by geoff. at 5:33 PM on March 13