The PC version did not have any cheats, in fact even the debug test version was cheat free.
However to help our faithful Total War players
we hid some save games in the game data. They are at the beginning of the full campaign but you start with a ton of cash. There are saves for most major countries included.
1.) Right click on the Application and select show package contents.
2.) Open Contents -> Resources -> Data -> data
3.) Copy the empire - gold rush saves.zip to the desktop.
4.) Close the Resources Finder window.
5.) Start the game to the pre game options panel.
6.) Select the "About" tab.
7.) Click on "Open Preferences Folder"
8.) You will see a folder called "AppData" inside you should see a folder called "save_games".
9.) Double click on the "empire - gold rush saves.zip" file a folder called "save_games" will appear.
10) Drag the 19 different save game files from the extracted zip into the save_games folder inside the preferences folder.
11) Start playing Empire. The load menu will now contain lots of save games of the full campaign but starting with huge amounts of cash.
Edwin