Nice !
I loved to see people react and get a better understanding of how they react (so I can add feedbacks and stuff).

To answer your question, you can avoid cheating at all by saying "no" or just ignoring the guy at the start; then you have no commands nor the cheap upgrades - you have the buy the official way that cost more (dropping the gold icon onto the chosen action).

And yeah, you had a rare bug, where the game just lock itself, no luck sorry (you had not the chance to see the others, stronger commands)

Ps : It was "defense" :D