Reporting some odd behavior with this trainer only. I've even re-downloaded it to be sure. It's triggering something that doesn't make any sense. When I run this particular trainer, my Symantec Endpoint Protection 14 is flagging the trainer with a SONAR hit that says "Trojan.Gen.2 Activity 16". It's also submitting the file to Symantec.
First, the entire subdirectory for trainers where this one is located is excluded in every way. This is the only trainer that does this, no other trainers trigger any errors or notifications.
Second, despite being detected on some level, the trainer continues to work as expected. There are no executional variances or issues that arise and the snit-virus doesn't stop it's execution or anything, which it shouldn't since it's excluded.
Finally, and the main issue, is that every time this train is executed, and it triggers SEP and the hit for the Trojan above, it's actually tracking and stopping/blocking traffic to 104.20.78.146 or 104.20.89.146. These IPs come back as dns.cloudflare.com, the server is bob.ns.cloudflare.com.
As I said, the trainer functionality is not affected in any way, I'm just curious as to why this trainer from CH would attempt to reference a 3rd party site that, so far as I know, isn't related to CH in any respect. Is this meant to happen?
You can create exclusions in Norton even for SONAR scans - Please perform this manually as Norton is too dumb to add applications automatically to the exception list if you allow them. Norton only stores a file signature about it but could report the very same file again. It's a false positive Norton detects.
It's the trainer's authentication process that requires internet access. All our web traffic is routed through Cloudflare as part of our site security. So again, this connection is safe as well.
If anyone is interested (or still plays this game), I have figured out a workaround for the trainer so that you can still use it (kind of) without it being detected (kind of) and not having acheivements and progress saved.
Start up your game as per usual (trainer, game, F1, Num3, start map). The trick here is that you only press Num1 (for 10,000 res) JUST BEFORE A CHECKPOINT. If you have used this trainer before, you notice that your resources are not increased until you spend some. Therefore, if you use the cheat just before a save, your resources are not increased and the game doesn’t notice that you’ve cheated. However, in the next wave, as soon as you start to build / spend resources, you will be granted the extra resources.
The problem with this is, that when you finish the next wave, it will detect that you cheated, so each time you use the cheat (and AFTER it has saved), you need to exit back to the main menu and load up your game again. It only takes a few seconds to do this.
The disadvantage of this method is that you can only get 10,000 resources every 3 levels (each checkpoint), but it will still let you get achievements and progress through the single-player campaign. I have noticed that 10,000 every few levels is more than enough to kick monster butt.
This seems to work perfectly, thanks Alachas!