Why bother playing, an arcade shoot-em-up would meet that need, although those do get harder as the levels increase.

The latter gives a subtle clue .... I'm also well into using cheats from time to time, all part of the fun, but you cant expect Stardock to waste copious resources on Cheats ......

The Cheats are only there to aid Developers, and since they are there, they make them available to Players. Anything more than that isn't happening, Stardock would not waste developer resources on such a none productive feature.

sasha777 & Zydor,

 I have played many games of GalCiv2, in every possible configuration over the years; iron man, without cheats, which cheats, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what we have fun with. I'm not one to go for multiplayer, I enjoy single player games, and I like playing them in a lot of different ways depending on my mood.

However, I have more fun using CTRL-N till I have I decent start, then play the game as I see it. I don't think my recent install even has the command line to active others, and I don't even know any other commands in FE: Fallen Heroes (if there are any, tried CTRL-N, it worked, that was it).

I do actually, I've done this myself. This was one thing I loved about sins.

I'm a turtle, I like to build my empire before fighting, it's where I get my enjoyment. My problem playing multiplayer is everyone always wants to rush. The best multiplayer games I had was when friends agreed to no hostilities before a certain amount of tunrs. Those games are fun to me... And don't we all want what is more fun? Even if it is a simple comand to INCREASE the difficulty?

Overall I counted up 32 of them, might be a couple more.

Google GalCiv Cheat Code and follow your nose

For those of us that like long slow-paced sessions, being able to change the difficulty "on the fly" would be a very nice to have feature.

By long, slow-paced, sessions -- I'm talking about games that might take 40-60 hours of play to finish, spread over a few weeks.  I might start at "challenging" but start to pull way ahead of the AI.  Rather then toss 10-20 hours of gameplay, or just gifting them techs / planets / etc. willy-nilly only to have them fritter them away again, it would be nice if I could bump the difficulty to the next level and see how the AI does from that point forward.

Look at it as a way of salvaging a game session that you've already played for 10-20 hours, so that you can get another 20-30 hours out of that map before it is over.

There could even be a game option where the AI difficult starts at your "preferred" level, but can automatically change based on how far ahead / behind you are compared to the rest of the AI players.  You could allow it to only increase the difficulty, only decrease it, or change it either way (and set how aggressive the dynamic difficulty scaling is). 

So if you're getting crushed, the AI starts being more likely to make mistakes that you can capitalize on (easier difficulty).  While if you are starting to run away with the win, the AI could be instructed to step up a level (or three) in difficulty, spend more CPU cycles and use smarter algorithms to try and stop you.