So yeah, the AI cheats like nothing. Somehow the AI players all have basically every mid-tier technology after only a couple years, yet remarkably they have none of the early techs. I give one of the AI players the space weapons tech, the most basic of all weapon techs, in exchange for one of their crap planets, and a month later they declare war on me because they have frigates now despite not even being able to chuck rocks a couple weeks ago.

So I figure if the AI can cheat so can I. Nothing major, just a battleship or maybe some free tech. Just enough so I can keep up. Only problem? The cheats don't seem to work. I did everything I was told. I put the word CHEAT on the end of my shortcut's target line. The game loads up, and I go into my game, but the cheats don't work. None of the keyboard shortcuts do anything, I tried all of them. The only one that does anything is CTRL+M, and all that does is mute the game.

I've tried this with my existing saves and with new games. None of the cheats work at all.