A cheater's confession...

[Kenthen]

I save scum like a mo@!"#¤##$r so I can't judge anyone using money cheats.
I mean I try not to but the game makes me so mad sometimes. XD

 

[Beagá]

Save scumming IS a cheat. Depending on how it´s done, it essentially becomes a Success=100% kind of cheat and can make stats, specially intrigue, totally irrelevant. Classical exmaple, assassination attempts.

Also, even one reload can make a critical difference, it´s just that the more you reload the easier the game gets. One example (and I´m sure everyone can give others). On my first doux of Athens game, ERE lost Armenia (predictable) and then 2 years later was DOWed by fatimids (CB: invasion of Greece. You can see where this is going...). After one critical battle, of 16k vs 15k stack, the emperor failed and I watched in horror as the war score went up and eventually Greece became "vomit" green (my most hated color lol)

Reloading before that critical battle, the next time the emperor won and the predictable result (specially because the emperors had really good Diplo) was that the ERE expanded a lot north and west (bye, Croatia). With one reload I made the future of my dinasty and the game TOTALLY different.

 

[Lorehead]

It’s one thing to ask, “What if I’d tried another strategy? Would that have worked better?” It’s another to answer the question, “What if I’d won through dumb luck?”

I admit it, I (often) cheat in single-player, so I’m not getting on my high horse here.

 

[Kenthen]

Save scumming IS a cheat. Depending on how it´s done, it essentially becomes a Success=100% kind of cheat and can make stats, specially intrigue, totally irrelevant. Classical exmaple, assassination attempts.

Also, even one reload can make a critical difference, it´s just that the more you reload the easier the game gets. One example (and I´m sure everyone can give others). On my first doux of Athens game, ERE lost Armenia (predictable) and then 2 years later was DOWed by fatimids (CB: invasion of Greece. You can see where this is going...). After one critical battle, of 16k vs 15k stack, the emperor failed and I watched in horror as the war score went up and eventually Greece became "vomit" green (my most hated color lol)

Reloading before that critical battle, the next time the emperor won and the predictable result (specially because the emperors had really good Diplo) was that the ERE expanded a lot north and west (bye, Croatia). With one reload I made the future of my dinasty and the game TOTALLY different.

Of course it's a cheat, I never said it wasn't.
It's an easy trap to fall into though, there's a lot of completely out of the blue shit that can happen in the game that I nowadays have trouble abiding to, even though I try to stay away from reloading more and more these days.

 

[High_King]

I'm glad I've sparked off a discussion about cheating on this forum without any hostility xD Hahaha

As I said in my last post, my best laid plans to marry my heir to the Duchess of Poitou with a vision of unifying the Duchies of Leinster and Poitou within a couple of generations and get my Irish dynasty involved in the insanity of French politics went all to Hell when the Duchess died, leaving her duchy to my heir's daughter, and my heir's second wife had a son who promptly become HIS heir after the Duchy of Leinster passed to him. It's an insanely annoying and tricky set of circumstances to have that happen; 98% if the time my dreams of French conquest should have been realised to the letter. It just sucks things go the way they did. Now that I'm a born again honest player, though, I'm intrigued as to where this will take me.

Best case scenario: I manage (despite my meagre funds at present) to kill my daughter (I've since taken control of said original heir) and claim her duchy for myself, thus unifying both lands anyway.

Worst case scenario: My dynasty is split into a cadet branch under vassalage to the kings of France while I soldier on as the head branch Dukes of Leinster and, hopefully, Kings of Ireland one day.

Either way it makes for an interesting story, which brings me back to what I said earlier, that sometimes the best moments in this game happen when everything goes horribly wrong. If I get a chance to have a long play today I'll post back with how things are going

 

[KPJ]

Sometimes I like to try new strategies, so I play out the same war a few times. I guess I never really thought about it, but the ones I play out are usually the ones which I lose! And I play them out until I get a victory, most of the time. I guess in this way the game becomes like 'levels' in a traditional video game. I don't do it about insignificant losses, of course, only for a 'game-over on defeat' scenario. I'm not sure if it's a valid use of the save-game feature or if it's cheating. I certainly do play out the games in which I lose pretty major wars, such as faction wars to install claimants on my primary title (if I have one to survive on in).

Thanks for posting your honest thoughts, folks, made for some good reading.

 

[Panzram]

When I first started playing strategy games I was a horrible savescummer but I quickly realized how detrimental it is for your experience. I only consider save scumming to be an option when I am JUST starting out a game and I have no idea what a feature/mechanic does and I want to see.

Otherwise, no way. The fun of the game is taking risks and taking responsibility for your choices. Gambling is pointless if you make sure that you always win. And really, it can be fun to go down in flames, often much more fun than just waltzing through effortlessly without any obstacles. It's even more fun when you screw something up and hit a huge obstacle, and manage to overcome it.

CK2 is good about keeping me from relapsing to my old savescumming ways. The whole process of having to resign first helps deter me than if there was a handy quickload button. But really, I HATE savescumming now. Even if I make a mistake, I'd rather keep progressing. Taking steps backwards and repeating parts just feels dirty to me now.

 

[Faber81]

I divide my games. In some games i cheat, mostly for the ai actually... i want to destroy the byz and the HRE while I'm playing Mali? I use the play ID cheat and create a mess, then I look at how the situation evolve). I want to create permanent tengri empires? I switch to the two khanates and add the zelous trait to every emperor so they'll never convert and add a couple of reinforcement by event so they'll stay strong.
I want to see the saxons win? I switch and capture with the imprison cheat the norman and the norwegian king. But when I save I add at the end of the name file a C to remind me that the game is compromised, is gone, is just for fantasy and with no personal challenges.
In my serious games I won't even reload. I can take everything the game toss at me (well, sometimes it's game over, but I usually can take everything). And those are my most satisfying games...
So don't worry if you cheat, it's fun to play god once in a while.

 

[ASPGolan]

I'm pro cheating in most single player games. I've got mixed feelings about CK2. I'll get into that after I explain why I agree with cheats.

1) cheating makes sense since there is no "Artificial Intelligence". most developers' concept of "AI" is a bunch of pre-defined responses to certain human interactions. if you play the game in a way they didn't anticipate -> it brakes gameplay. i find no fun in playing a game in a god-like style. it ruins it even more than crapy AI. however i use cheats to compensate for punitive gameplay or weak AI. with weak AI is clear. give cash to a foreign ruler so he improves his realm before you hit him. with punitive gameplay, I already played the game fair and already know that I can handle it. but the game just puts you in a repetitive loop to accomplish something (i.e. you brake an army and they just keep running away in other regions, in early CK2 versions you had to chase and rebattle the same army for months before destroying it - that was really stupid gameplay; just edit the save game, increase the progress on the movement of your troops and just end it from the 2nd, 3rd hit on that army)... this makes a lot a sense to me. I really don't get people who argue that I should adapt to this idiotic stuff just for the sake of not braking the game (it is already broken in this regard, and even if I see that, I still appreciate the content and other aspects).

2. mixed feelings in regards to ck2. the ck2 doesn't involve "farming", as other games do (IMO). and cheating really brakes the balance of the game in favour of the human player. however, i find just as much satisfaction in games i cheat as in games i don't. there are types of game where i try to create a certain alternative line in history and I just disagree with random developments. so i intervene in favour of the AI or to give a temporary boost to a dynasty so it stays in the game (including for my own)... this gives a much better gameplay. i see here that others use this a lot. the second type of game is where i just pick a scenario, historic or not and afterwards i want to see the vision of the game developer on "what would happen if". this also brings in a very interesting perspective. mind that the start of the game might be obtained by cheating means too. the later development however, not.

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there's some players that eliminate the economy from the game (the eternal cash cheat). what if a certain person wouldn't have been limited by money in real life? i also do that sometimes. that's not good gameplay however, but with games with so poor economics implemented, I really don't care. ck2 has poor economics implemented.

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other games are reactive to cheating, if you get better, the AI gets unfair advantages to compensate. in CK2 the mechanics of the AI is too decoupled of human input. its easy to brake balance with cheating, but if you are an experienced coder, it will bring down very cool results.

 

[nota999]

I don't use cheats and I rarely reload (mostly only if my leader dies at a really inconvenient time :angry

 

[Ciccillo Rre]

I used to be a save scummer in CK2 and V2 as well, to eventually realize that real enjoyment comes from the linearity of the story and "dealing with what you get".

Now however I tend to play entire campaigns from 1066 to 1453 like this: I start as a OPM count made via RD who is some obscure remote descendant of a fallen, yet once powerful dynasty (e.g. Makedoniko, Umayyad) and become King with that character, Emperor with his third or fourth descendent (or later if I want to de jure drift more land to my primary kingdom title) and ahistorically expand that Empire.

I tend to restart some save scumming some time in the second half of the campaign in this case. I do not see it much of a cheat as I usually have become the strongest player on the map by this point, except maybe for the Mongols, but since the extent of micromanagement increases sharply at that point in the game I need it to avoid things I could check but I don't (e.g. factions and revolts, enemy armies outmaneuvering mine) and reach my anyways perfectionist objectives.

 

[Beagá]

Through to be honest more often than not the game forces its hand a lot, specially regarding traits.

As toddler duke, my guardian removed the Ambitious trait, did nothing to remove the Craven, and added Content. F*** you bastard and no he had more than 70 relations :glare:

 

[Arizal]

Just to go back with this thread, if this doesn't bother anyone, I have found a trick to help me not cheating by reloading. Because I don't want to lose some great events in my game because of a crash, I tended to set autosave at 1 year. However, there still can happen many things in one year, so I just set it to one month and it works fine. Yes, there is the waiting after each month, but I have no excuse if I want to go back, and usually if I made a mistake, it took me some months before taking notice or it was immediate, so now I cannot really turn back several years except if I saved for the posterity at a given date.

So far, I finished a game in vanilla as France - Francia and the only time I reloaded was when I wanted to undo the increase in CA I did five years before the end of the game without harm. I also tried Dal and had been put game over by an hungry Norway, but it was fun as it lasted. I even managed to become duke of Vastergotland before the end!

So, save by month and you won't be able to turn back one year prior, and if you do it will clearly be for cheat in your head. For me, it works!