Cheat Engine

[LongBeardedLion]

Im on a challenge to change the civilization choice in my game.

I tried looking for the address in cheat engine by using increase/decrease scans.

But i could not find anything but an address that controls the civ you are about to click.

So that does not select the civ, it seems that it simply checks the civ you are about to select.

So if you change the number in that address. And you click on the little bar that selects the civ it actually shows the civ that you just changed in cheat engine HIGHLIGHTED, although not selected.

As you can see in the image below. The highlighted civ is "Goths", thats civ 5 counting from 0. 0 is Britons. If you change that number, from 5 to 6 it will HIGHLIGHT Japanese. But not select it.

So it works only for highlighting the civ. But not selecting. So i assume somewhere forward in the code, there will be some kind of loop or comparison to detect if you actually click/select the civ you are currently highlighting.

So i wonder if anyone knows how should i proceed to solve this problem? How do i detect where the civ actually changes (instead of just being highlighted), if it doesnt show up in Cheat Engine?

Please help.

[ParkourPenguin]

When you click on "Start Game", which civ are you: the highlighted one or the selected one?

If it's the highlighted one (that you can control), then the easiest solution is to ignore what the text says. It's just a GUI thing; it doesn't affect the game.
Otherwise, try scanning for changed/unchanged 4-byte values (use 8-byte for a 64-bit process); there's probably a pointer somewhere you can change.

(it's a little presumptuous to assume down is increased and up is decreased; perhaps you should try changed/unchanged instead)

[LongBeardedLion]

I change the value in cheat engine in the only address that shows up, after doing changed/unchaged searches.

This value changes the highlighting of the civ, as if it is about to select it. Like when you hover a button and it highlights it. It stays highlighted.

So even when you click the selection box to change the civ, it shows as the civ that you changed in cheat engine. However, when i start the game it still his the old civ. So nothing changed.

It tried many times doing searches this is the only value i got.

Its really strange that something as important does not show a specific value.

I might make a video to show it.

Any other suggestions for now?

[ParkourPenguin]

If the game was written less than optimally, it could be reallocating memory every time the civ changes. You could try finding a pointer to this memory, but the amount of false positives could make it difficult. e.g. if you select goths, unknown initial value scan, select something else, select goths again, the memory the pointer is pointing to could've changed even though the civ didn't (i.e. changed value scan). Even then, by random chance, the game could reuse memory that was previously deallocated, and it would be an unchanged value regardless of civ choice.

You could try reverse engineering the game's code, but that's never easy. Writes to that other value you found could be a good starting point.