Relic Entertainment has historically taken a hard stance against cheating. In Company of Heroes 2, maphackers were frequently hit with "Red Triangle" bans. For CoH3, Relic has implemented several measures:
However, players argue that Relic needs to do more. Currently, there is no in-game "Suspected Cheater" notification system, and the ban waves are silent. Many top 50 ladder players have shared screenshots of facing the same obvious hacker three days in a row with no ban.
The most basic function. The entire map is rendered as if the player has a unit every five feet. This is rarely used in its raw form because it is visible in replays (the camera moves over unexplored territory). Modern cheats use "soft" fog removal—terrain is visible, but only enemy units ping.
Every unit, building, and capture point in COH3 has a binary state: Visible or Hidden. In a clean game, your client only renders "Hidden" objects as black voids. However, to sync the game state between two players (Peer-to-Peer with a relay server for COH3 1v1/2v2), your computer technically knows where the enemy tank is; it just refuses to draw it on your screen.
A maphack injects a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) into the COH3 process. This DLL scans the game’s memory for the specific hexadecimal values controlling the "Visibility Flag" and flips them. To the cheat, it’s a simple line of code: if (unit.isEnemy) setVisibility(True);