Expansion Hack

 

From the 6 "expansions" you start out with in the game, you need another 190 expansions to fully expand.  If you check my Expansions table, you'll see that that requires 44,627,019 Coins and 37,560 Liberty Bonds, not counting crewed expansions.  If you accumulated about 100 Liberty Bonds per day, it would take about a year to get that many Liberty Bonds to fully expand.  It is a tedious, long-term endeavor, indeed.

Here's a trick to fully expand quickly.  I assume that you are familiar with Charles, the popular web debugging proxy application, or Cheat Engine.  The first approach I'll describe is just to get you to understand the idea.  You'll actually want to use the second approach to do many expansions at once without having to refresh the game.

If you are familiar with Cheat Engine but not Charles, do not be discouraged!  It's possible to just do the first approach using Cheat Engine alone--just ignore everything about Charles.

[March 29, 2012 note: I just wrote another article "Expansion Hack #2" that slightly modifies the Cheat Engine approach explained here.  The method in this other article avoids refreshing and sets the Coins requirement for expansion to 0.]


First Approach

The first approach can be done using either Charles or Cheat Engine.  Using Charles is the safer approach as it makes one small modification in one request, and doesn't modify the state of the game otherwise.  Using Cheat Engine is more dangerous but simpler.

Make sure you have enough Coins and Liberty Bonds to do an expansion first.


First Approach Using Cheat Engine

Scan for the text "x01" and replace it with the text "x10".  It works better if you INCLUDE the quotes in your search.  Once you do this, do not look at the Expansions tab of your inventory as that will freeze the game.

Now make an expansion.  The expansion's cost in Coins and Liberty Bonds will be deducted.  However, if you refresh the game, you will see that your Liberty Bonds and Coins are back to their original numbers but your new expansion is still there!

Repeat the process as desired.  Expansion costs are scaled, so you will need an ever increasing number of Coins and Liberty Bonds.  Another annoying part of this process is having to constantly refresh the game.  There's a way to avoid this using Charles--see "Second Approach".


First Approach Using Charles

Make sure breakpoints are set on the "flashservices" subfolder of "http://fb-client-zc.empire.zynga.com".  Now do an expansion.  Look for an AMF request with target "BaseService.dispatchBatch," one of whose objects has functionName "UserService.buyExpansion."  Look for code "x01" (this is the code for an Expansion) and change it to "x10".  Execute all requests.

If you refresh the game, you will see that your Liberty Bonds and Coins are back to their original numbers but your new expansion is still there!

Repeat the process as desired.  Expansion costs are scaled, so you will need an ever increasing number of Coins and Liberty Bonds.  Another annoying part of this process is having to constantly refresh the game.  There's a way to avoid this using Charles.


Second Approach

Here's how to do as many expansions as you like without having to refresh the game.  You will need to use both Charles and Cheat Engine.

Refresh the game and set breakpoints on in Charles.  Look for the AMF request that contains "userInfo".

Look under "world" for "resources" and then "coins."  Change the number of Coins to an amount sufficient to do all of your expansions, say 99999999 (99 million and a lot of change; there are eight 9's).  Try not to use commas as I don't know if the game server will accept them.

Now, look under "player" for "inventory" and then "items".  Search for "xk01" (Liberty Bonds).  Change the number for it to an amount sufficient to do all your expansions, say 40000.

Execute all requests and the game should load.  Now use Cheat Engine to change the text "x01" to "x10".  Once you do this, do not look at the Expansions tab of your inventory as that will freeze the game.  Now, start expanding!

You'll find that the most annoying and tedious part of this whole process is doing the actual expansions!