My son, now 13, played an unbelievable amount of Medieval 2 Total War, but he didn't want to progress slowly, he wanted to dominate.
His first goal was to become the Pope, which you achieve by having a priest/cardinal of high enough piety to win a Papal election, but he was highly disappointed when he discovered that when a member of your faction is elected Pope, you essentially lose that guy and he becomes the NPC leader of the Vatican. I guess he wanted to have both his starting faction and the Vatican under his command, and this pissed him off. Shortly thereafter, he found out that you could unlock some unplayable factions through a config file edit, including his coveted Vatican and the Mongol Horde. But again he was disappointed to find those factions buggy and lacking in the ass-kicking department.
This was about the time he found out about console commands and cheat codes, and sadly he has never looked back. He figured out how to create units, bump unit experience, place buildings in cities, and of course, how to give himself any amount of money. Before long he was sweeping across Europe with a dozen French armies whose only units were elephants with cannons on their backs, all while his treasury was filled with millions of dollars. This is blasphemy to me, since it removes any sort of challenge and actually makes him worse at the game since he doesn't have to worry about unit balance, city/resource management, budgeting, etc.
I kept giving him shit about playing with the cheats, and several times he'd restart a campaign, swearing that THIS TIME he would do it legit. When I'd ask him about his new campaign a few days later, he'd insist he hadn't cheated, but later add that, well, he did cheat just a little bit because he didn't like being out of money.
Hearing that Empire has removed those cheat codes is great news for me. I bought it last week but haven't had a chance to play it yet. My son has given it a few hours, but it doesn't seem to have grabbed him the same way Medieval did. Part of that is probably his great interest in the Medieval setting as opposed to the 18th century, but I'm sure some of it has to do with the fact that he can't cheat anymore.
