Total War: ROME 2 Cheats on PC

The console is real, and empty

Press the key and a console appears. That much is true, and it is what keeps the Rome 1 cheat lists in circulation. A thread on the Steam forum has been reposting add_money 40000, process_cq and toggle_fow for years, and the replies under it are players reporting that none of them do anything in Rome 2. One of them puts it plainly: there is a real console, and nobody has found a cheat for it.

That is the state of things because Creative Assembly removed working cheats from the console with Empire in 2009. Medieval 2 was the last Total War where typing a command bought you something. Rome 2 arrived in 2013 on the newer engine, got its Emperor Edition on 16 September 2014 as a free upgrade, and closed its content with Rise of the Republic and the free Power & Politics update on 9 August 2018. The command list did not change in any of it.

So a Rome 2 cheat guide that prints console commands is printing a guide for the wrong game.

What mods can and cannot do

The Workshop for Rome 2 is deep, and a lot of what people want from a cheat is in there as a rebalance: cheaper buildings, faster research, larger units, less public-order trouble. A mod changes the rules for the campaign you start with it.

What a mod does not do is act on the turn you are in. There is no mod that hands the treasury 20,000 denarii because you clicked something, and no mod that finishes the aqueduct that has four turns left. Mods set the slope. The turn count is still the turn count.

And a campaign on the harder difficulties is mostly turn count. Provinces need buildings that take turns, armies need recruitment that takes turns, and the war on the other side of the map needs an army that is eleven turns of marching away.

What the trainer does, and why seven of them are free

The Total War: ROME 2 trainer lists 20 cheats. Seven are free, and for a trainer that is a large free share, so it is worth reading which ones.

Money is free in both directions, Add and Sub. Unlimited movement is free for armies and for agents, which is the eleven-turn march, gone. Set level to 10 is free for the selected character. And city population overrun is free in both directions, plus one and back to zero, the number that decides whether a province grows or riots.

The premium thirteen are the turn count itself. One-turn construction, one-turn research, one-turn recruit: three switches, three waits. Unlimited skill points and a switch back to none, fill experience for army and general, set the mercenary pool to nine, unlimited agent actions. Then the battle side, heal units and decrease units for the enemy, super-size units, and public order at maximum or at minimum for the province you have selected.

There is a pattern in the pairs. Money up and down, population up and down, skill points on and off, public order max and min. Half this list is a hard mode as much as a cheat, which fits a game whose players have been running Legendary campaigns for thirteen years.

The one decision

Mods if what you want is a different Rome 2, from turn one, with the rules you prefer. They are free, plentiful, and they survive achievements.

The trainer if what you want is this campaign, this turn, with the march or the aqueduct done. The free seven cover money and movement. The premium switches cover the waiting. It changes values in memory on your own PC, single-player.

The console stays as it is. Open it if you like the look of it.