I find it amazing that the save file format is in text and thus easier to look through and see whats going on, so we've got alot to be grateful for when it comes to that. Usually do to enormous data chunks for things like where all the tiles are in the battlegame that forces a designer to just dump their savefiles as raw data. As far as I know the current Funds you've got are the only part thats convoluted since it looks like it tabulates the grand total of all your income and expenditures and that determines how much money you've currently got.
There's alot more you can do to savegames than just giving yourself items. Its even somewhat easy to give yourself money in X-Piratez because you can just give yourself the credit chips and sell them ingame.
Sometimes I cheat by checking the missions slated, map positions of enemies, and otherwise spying on the internals. In a roleplaying game (tabletop anyway) the characters would have a much better understanding of whats going on, so theme-wise its not entirely out of character.
Ive used it for honest hacks to bypass the game's RNG by giving myself something that frankly should have come up already. Either that or I made a stupid mistake with forgetting to construct a building earlier because I got carried away with micromanaging - ordered a guy from the mercinaries which I already had in my stores - yknow forhead smacking screwups that would have been corrected by reloading a savegame but I didnt want to perform all the micromanaging I had just spent 15-20 minutes tweaking.
(ie, clicking Undo button)
There's cheating to make the game fun when its not cooperating, and there's game genie NES cheating that just lets you do whatever and destroys the fun of the game. Its a personal responsibility.
for OXC and X-Pirates its a case of lets be grateful we dont need a savegame editor
It's an OpenXcom question then, but what documentation is there for manipulating the information in the files? For example, looking at the contents it is completely unclear where I would look in order to modify characters (friend or foe) on the battlescape, attributes such as TU, location and position, inventory contents... The only information I can find is always about changes on the Geoscape, particularly adding money.
Unrelated, it seems as though many of the robbery (manufacturing) options are specifically tailored to be worth around half as much as ransoming that prisoner. Why is that?