"Ironman" mode

[John_Yuki]

I love playing Europa Universalis 4. In this game there is an "ironman mode", which you need to use if you want to earn achievements. The idea behind it is that it makes it harder to cheat (though in reality it is poorly implemented and it's still very easy to cheat). It would be great if FM had some kind of ironman mode that made it far more difficult to cheat. The two mod common cheating methods include "save scumming" and using editors (whether official or 3rd party) to change values in the game. Changing the values in game is done through reading and writing to/from memory addresses. Games such as War Selection implement methods that make this *way* more difficult, so that you can't just simply load up Cheat Engine and change values at-will, it obfuscates the actual values so that you can't actually find what you're looking for. By implementing measures to prevent save scumming, and also implementing methods to stop editors from working, it would allow us to have an ironman mode in FM.

I run /r/footballmanagergames, and I personally would love to see an ironman mode so that we could hold competitions far more easily without having to worry about all the cheaters that inevitably come along to ruin the fun. Even on these forums you have people running leaderboards to see who can complete things the fastest, such as the pentagon challenge, san marino challenge, and so on, however it's impossible to know if people who submit their scores to these things are cheating or not - ironman mode would fix this. 

Ironman mode would also make achievements more special. It's super easy to just use 3rd party editors to change everything in the game and make it super simple to get the difficult achievements, and adding save scumming on top of that, it just devalues achievements.

Ironman mode would be a completely optional thing when setting up the database, so people who want to have a more relaxed save and just cheat a bit here and there can continue to do so, but the people who actually want to show of that they did something legitimately can then use ironman mode to do so. 

Bit of a long post, I hope it was coherent enough to understand,  

[Zachary Whyte]

Thank you for the detailed post. This we'll be considered by the developers.