DoW3 Console Commands, Devmode, Scar Functions and Cheats.

Relic games developers have had a console and devmode for almost all of their RTS games. DoW3 is no different you can get access to the console in this game too.

To open the console you have to press Ctrl + Shift + ~
From here you can do a few things like bring up a FPS graph with commands like "statgraph" and "statgraph_channel("fps")"

Other commands that are easy to use are:
quit- this will quit out of DoW3 and close the game
restart- restarts the game
capturemoviestart(fps) - ex "capturemoviestart(30)" will take screenshots at 30fps till you tell it to stop. The files are somewhere in the dow3 mydocs folder
capturemoviestop - stop the screenshots

There are more commands in the console and you can press tab to cycle through the list of commands. The syntax is tricky to figure out and I personally don't know a lot of them.

So now we know how to get to the consoles but how do we get to the cheats? Well that is what devmode is for. You have to launch DoW3 in devmode to get to them. The console for DoW3 in normal mode has a limited set of commands you can run and that is on purpose. It would be very bad if you can turn on cheats in an mp ranked game but devmode is mostly separated from normal mode.

To enable devmode set your launch options for DoW3 to include -dev That all you need to do and now when you run the game you are in devmode and can't play ranked games. You are also in separated custom game pool so you can't play with anyone in normal mode.

So what can you do in devmode? Well if you bring down the console and tab through the commands you will find a ton of more commands you can do. Some of these commands will let you increase your pop limit and turn on the cheats. Here is a small list of commands I have found to work.

Player_SetPopCapOverride(Game_GetLocalPlayer(), pop limit size) - ex "Player_SetPopCapOverride(Game_GetLocalPlayer(), 4096)" will get you a pop size of 4096
setsimrate(gamespeed) - ex "setsimrate(100)" this will set the game speed. I am not sure what the regular speed of the game is but it should be around 10
cheat_buildtime - instant build time
cheat_ignorecosts - ignore cost of units and elite points
cheat_resources(amount) - ex "cheat_resources(1000)" 1000 of every resource including elite points
cheat_revealall - turn off fog of war

I just want to put up a small bit on the SCAR functions. A lot of these commands use the SCAR functions and that is basically the scripting language the game uses. Most people don't need to know much about SCAR function as it will mostly be used for mods and stuff like that. Do some googling on it and you will find a lot of the old relic games documentation on it. I hope someone makes a nice doc for DoW3 as well.

Anyway last thing I want to say is that the cheats and devmode will allow you to earn XP for your elites as well and you get skulls for playing custom online games. That said you can also have some cool epic battles with friends like a 1000 vs 1000 army and see your fps drop to single digits but it will be epic. Another thing you can do is lab tests if you are a competitive player and want to do practical tests very quickly to see if 5 squads or tac marines will beat something like 2 Dark Avengers etc.