Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance – Identifying Use of Resource Transfer Cheat in Replays

How to tell when someone used the resource transfer cheat by inspecting a replay.

How to Cheat

A while back, myself and a couple other players uncovered a bug in the game’s simulation related to donating resources (mass, energy) to other players. We discovered that while the simulation guards against having another player send resources to you, it does not guard against you sending negative resources to another player (and this is the case regardless of team).

We also discovered that the Civilians count as a player when enabled, and that diplomatic actions could be sent to them as well. Further, we found that even if a player has no mass or energy in stockpile, attempting to draw more than they have via a negative gift will still put the resources in your pool (and sometimes reduce that player’s construction progress – we’re not sure how that works).

This means that with modded lua files in gamedata it was possible to take resources from other players, or basically create them “out of thin air” from the civilians. We originally created this as a means of countering a small group of routine cheaters who showed up early in the morning and used building duplication and paused engineer assist (they change their names a lot – one of them is Kepler, one sometimes goes by Rubber, the other varies).

This mod appears to be in use by some players in normal games however, so here is how you can identify the use of this mod by analyzing an SCFAreplay file.

1. Go to Hexed.it
2. Click Open File, navigate to Documents\My Games\Gas Powered Games\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\replays[your username here] and select the SCFAreplay file
3. On the right hand side, Search for GiveResourcesToPlayer (as text)
4. When you find it, you will notice the following text:

Mass
To
From
Energy

You will also notice they are followed by some periods, and then assorted characters. Click the THIRD period after a given text item and look to the left. In the Data Inspector (Little-Endian) look for “32-bit Float P.”

The value here is what that matching text was set to. Mass and Energy are percentages – 1 is 100, 0.5 is 50%, etc, and reflects slider position. To and From are player indices – slot 1 in the lobby becomes player 1, slot 2 player 3, etc. Civilians get 1 more than the number of players.

5. If Mass or Energy’s value was NEGATIVE then the player in that slot has been cheating using this mod. Similarly if you see a player index of 9 (civilians) that would indicate cheating, same if you see a player giving resources to the other team, which the UI normally doesn’t allow.