Sid Meier’s Civilization: Cheats

In-Play

Cheat Mode

If you have version 1 (that is, if your game says version 474.01 or 475.01 when you start it up), hit shift-56. It will reveal the entire map and give you a variety of cheat options in the F1-F10 menus. You can enter enemy cities, sell their city walls, and then unfortify the defense. This cheat is the best.

F… Function in cheat mode
F1 Your enemies’ military plans (A-Attack, D-Defend, S-Settle, N-Naval). It will even suggest some plans for you sometimes.
F2 Same as always
F3 Some wierd graphics. May be useful???
F4 Same as always
F5 Same as always
F6 Same as always
F7 Civilization breakdown showing government type, diplomatic status, population, treasury, tax rate, # of mil units, # of cities, # of settlers, amount of land (units unknown), and technology.
F8 Civilization PowerGraph + Replay. Even if you don’t want to cheat (just press shift+56 immediately after exiting the replay option to avoid seeing the map), this is handy. It can show you how well you’re doing.
F9 Some military thing, listed by continent. I prefer F1 or just scanning the map.
F10 Fully revealed map

Randomize Enemy leaders

This cheat is activated using alt + r. This randomly selects new qualities (like expantionistic or Friendly) for the computer civs. If you have embassies, you can monitor it till you find some values you like. Of course, embassies only produce these values if you are playing on the easier difficulty levels. If you really, really, want to control your opponents’ characteristics, but you are on an Emperor game or something, you may want to consider temporarily changing the difficulty level.

Fast Settler

If you tell a settler to do something and then wait until the "end of turn prompt comes up, you can reselect him, he will have already done one turn’s worth of work on the job to which you assigned him. Tell him to do the same job again and he will do another turn’s worth of work on it. You can continue this until he is doen whatever he is doing. The do it for all your settlers, if you have the patience. This is also handy for settlers on roads. All you do is take two steps, so the moves left thing says ".1" and then tell the settler to do something. Immediately reselect him and he has his three moves back. Only take two of those three, of course. The only problem with this is that all of that reselecting and reasigning is accumulative like in the above paragraph, so if you use this cheat to go long distances, your settler may stop somewhere along the line and actually build what you tell him to build (proposterous!). This is really handy if you have a city which is doomed and you want to evacuate. Buy tonnes of settlers and use this cheat to get them to another city instantly. Then press "B" to settle them in that city. This can really save a city under attack. This cheat can be combined with waterbridging in my strategy guide to build endless waterbridges to nowhere in one turn. Once the fast settler has built one railroad, move the boat. Hit unload, and start again.

Free Moves

Sentry a unit in a city as its last move. Enter the city and unsentry it. It now has all of its moves back. Handy for travelling fast across a continent or killing 20 attackers with one chariot (attack, sentry, unsentry, repeat).

Ship Sentry

This cheat is employed in the strategy "Ferries" listed under Military Advisor in the strategy page. All you have to know is that a sentried ship can be unsentried by boarding it with one unit. This can not only be used for ferries, but also for travelling around the world in one turn (just pass 1 unit back and forth between 2 boats). When this cheat is being used, the "end of turn" message may come up when a sentried ship has just been boarded. Just click on the ship or press "tab" to get control of the ship. Can also use a fast settler to bring its moves back. Or, instead of unsentrying the ship with a unit, use another ship. Put them on the same square and hit "U" or select unload from the Orders menu.

Save Game I

This is obvious, but irritating, because Civ has no "load saved game" option once you start. Basically, you save EVERY year. If ANYTHING goes wrong, you quit and load your last save till you get it right. This cheat can also be used to keep the computers from getting wonders. The computer players get them randomly instead of building them, like you do. Go back to your last save, and take it back!

Save Game II

This cheat plays off of a useful bug in the game saving part of the program. The game saves the map and where all of your units are, but it does not save a list of which have already moved and which have yet to move. If some have moved and some have not when the games is saved (in other words, as long as the "end turn" message isn’t there) then they will all be able to move again when you load the game. To make use of this, simply move all of your units but one, then save and load and you will be able to move them all. I suppose this might be useful if you are in a crucial point in a nuclear war or perhaps you need a certain unit to be in several places at once. (Thanks to Raffa for reminding me about this one).

Space Barge

Win the space race easy! Build a space ship with one habitation unit and one engine. Forget the fact that the display says 0% chance of success, and launch it!

Hack the Save File

There are three ways to hack the save game file: using debug, using a different hex editor, or using the saved game editor application. The exact steps for hacking the saved game file using debug are laid out on this page. If you have a favourite hex editor and you want to use that one instead, then simply follow the directions below for debug, but you may need to subtract 100 from the hex locations for them to work. For example, instead of changing byte 102 (for switching sides), you would have to use byte 002. If you want the easiest way, you can download the Civilization Saved Game Editor by clicking here. And now, on with how to use debug…

To hack a civilization save-file using debug (a hex editor that is built-in to MS DOS, so everyone has it :), go into DOS and find the directory of your civilization game.
Type:
debug civil#.sve (# = 0-7)

Example:
debug civil0.sve

You’ll get a prompt that looks like this:
-
Press d and enter.
-d

A whole bunch of hex-garbage comes up on the screen.

When you’re done editing the save file type w, enter, q and enter again.
-w
-q

Switch Sides

By typing: e 102 ## you can switch to a different civ, where ## = 00 (red-barbarians), 01 (white-Russians/Romans), 02 (green-Zulus/Babylonians), 03 (blue-Germans/French), 04 (yellow-Aztecs/Egyptians), 05 (lt Blue-Americans/Chinese), 06 (pink-English/Greeks), 07 (grey-Mongols/Indians). This is very useful. Start the game. Build one city only and defend it well. Once you have good defense, save and quit. Now, Edit the save file to change the difficulty to something amazingly high (Find out how to do this here). Now, go back to the game and try to keep your city alivce for as long as possible. Right before it dies, save & quit and then put the difficulty back to whatever it was before and switch sides to one of these super-civs created by the ultimate computer players.

Example:
-e 102 02
(this changes the cililization you control to either the Zulus or the Babylonians. Only one will be in the game at a time, and that’s the one you will switch to)

Time Travel

Type: e 108 ## ## Changes the year. Mess around to find out how the values translate. Some day, I may put in the time and actually get the exact values for you. Note that all this does is change the clock, it does not reverse events. If you want to reverse events you have to go back to an old save game file (duh). It is useful for extending the game beyond built-in limits for the difficulty level, allowing a theoretically infinite score.

Example:
-e 108 03 02
(The last two values were just guesses. 03 and 02 are pretty low, so this kind of an input would put you pretty far back in time.)

Change Difficulty

If you’re losing, you can make it easier, then harder when you’re ahead. Type: e 10a ##. 00 is Chief, 04 is emperor. 05 is quite hard. The values go up, but the possibilty of winning ends there.

Example:
-e 10a 04
(Changes the difficulty of the game to Emperor)

$30,000 Cash

The value to change depends on which colour you are playing:

  • White (Romans/Russians): ###=23A
  • Green (Zulus/Babylonians): ###=23C
  • DK Blue (French/Germans): ###=23E
  • Yellow (Aztecs/Egytians): ###=240
  • LT Blue (Americans/Chinese): ###=242
  • Pink (Greeks/English): ###=244
  • Grey (Indians/Mongols): ###=246

Now type: e ### FF 75

Example:
-e 23E FF 75
(Give the French or the Germans $30,000)

Get Current Technology

The value to change depends on which colour you are playing:

  • White (Romans/Russians): ###=24A
  • Green (Zulus/Babylonians): ###=24C
  • DK Blue (French/Germans): ###=24E
  • Yellow (Aztecs/Egytians): ###=250
  • LT Blue (Americans/Chinese): ###=252
  • Pink (Greeks/English): ###=254
  • Grey (Indians/Mongols): ###=256

Now type: e ### 75 75

Example:
-e 256 75 75
(Gives the Indians or the Mongols the technology they are currently working on)

Get All Technology

The value to change depends on which colour you are playing:

  • White (Romans/Russians): ###=5F2
  • Green (Zulus/Babylonians): ###=5FC
  • DK Blue (French/Germans): ###=606
  • Yellow (Aztecs/Egytians): ###=610
  • LT Blue (Americans/Chinese): ###=61A
  • Pink (Greeks/English): ###=624
  • Grey (Indians/Mongols): ###=62E

Now type: e ### FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF

Example:
-e 61A FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF FF
(Gives the Americans or the Chinese all technology. Note there are exactly 10 sets of FF)

At the Start

New Civilization

Want to play the Canadians, eh? When starting the game, it asks for you to pick a civ from the list. Hit Escape. Now enter the civ you want. Note: when you first hit escape, there was already a name in the box. This is the civ you will "act" like. You will be that civ’s colour, plus the preset names for cities will match that civ’s.

Do you know of some Civilization cheats that I didn’t list? Tell me about them, and I’ll list them here with credit to you.

None of these cheats are original creations, so feel free to use them anywhere you wish. However, this cheats page and all the text on it is copyright ©2000 Greg Viers (A.K.A. The TTG Guy). Special thanks in particular goes to CivMan who found and documented many of the hex bytes which appear here.