 |
| My Dictator Self |
A disclaimer
I love city building games. What I
really want is Sim City 5, but that doesn't exist. I was reading
about video games and decided to try out Tropico, which has both city
building and strategy elements. Since I am much more into city
planning than political intrigue and building up armies, and the
review reflects that point of view.
In a nutshell
You play as the dictator of a small
island in the year 1950 (think Cuba) and can choose to be a
benevolent ruler or a cruel tyrant. Your political and economic
decisions and layout of your island will either make your people
happy or cause them to rebel.
Starting out
You can choose to be modeled on a real
dictator, or your own creation. You pick several options which will
start you off with different bonuses. For example if you pick that
your background is from many generations of police you start off with
lower crime, if you went to school in the US you have a higher
diplomatic rating with the US and lower with the Soviets.
You get a random island to start with.
Since you can't build on strong slopes, if you get a mountainous
island it makes it much harder. On my first two play throughs I got
mountainous islands, and that really limited my building space. On
my third game I got a great island with lots of flat areas to build.
To start you get $10,000 in your
treasury, a dictator's palace, a tenement, a garage, a construction
office and a trucking company (teamsters). You also get some other
random things – I got two corn farms in my most recent game.
You want what?
You will get hints from your adviser,
and various characters will request that you do things which will
earn you money or support from various factions and countries. Much
like Sim City, the advice you get is not always good and can really
bankrupt you. For example, by trying to please the nationalists by
raising salaries, I lost a lot of money and went to a negative
balance in the treasury. I never did please the nationalists either.
Ca-Ching!
You have several different ways of
making money. You can export raw materials from farms, mines or
fishing. You can refine and export materials by making factories and
canning facilities. You can build a tourist dock and attractions for
tourists. You make money from building restaurants, pubs and other
enterprises.
Every six months a freighter arrives
and will take your exports and bring imports if you want any. So at
first you want to be ready with cash crops like tobacco and coffee.
Later you can make more money by building factories which make
exports like cigars and rum.
You can build pubs, restaurants and
other businesses for your citizens to patronize.
You can build a tourist dock and build
stuff for tourists. I found this was really hit and miss. Some
stuff like motels and bars made money right away, and things like the
tour company and souvenir stands lost money. The revolving
restaurant lost a lot of money! The zoo made tons of money while the
casino sat empty. But the revenue from the profitable ventures made
up for the losses.
How do I do this, and do I care?
The game didn't
feel that intuitive. It's easy to start out making a country,
building farms and housing. Once it gets to more complicated though,
you have to wonder if parts of the game are supposed to be that way
or just hard to figure out.
When you accept a
request from a faction or country, it goes to the bottom right of
your screen until you complete it. It doesn't seem possible to
remove the requests and you can only accept a limited amount of them.
One of the requests is from the Chinese
government who asks that you send them a certain amount of goat
cheese. No problem! I made several goat ranches. But how to make
cheese? On the place where you enhance the ranch there's only a place
to make a beef smokehouse. Oops. But I had to have the request on
my screen taking up space.
I also had agreed to send oil to
another country, and though I was producing oil I couldn't figure out
how to get it there. I'm sure there was some way of doing it, but it
wasn't intuitive to me and by the time I got to that point I had
really lost interest.
If I really was the dictator I would
let people park on the street
 |
| 4 garages needed for an area which is not built up much! |
Traffic is a hard thing to deal with.
Tropico has many cars but apparently outlaws street parking. Some
buildings have their own garages, but many buildings like apartments
and movie theaters need parking but don't have it. This means you
will have to build one nearby.
When your downtown area gets built up, you will receive many notices that your garage is overloaded and you need to build another one nearby. You will have to demolish buildings and put garages in their place. I had one stretch in my last game with 5 garages in a row, and still more were needed. This just doesn't fit into the game well.
When your downtown area gets built up, you will receive many notices that your garage is overloaded and you need to build another one nearby. You will have to demolish buildings and put garages in their place. I had one stretch in my last game with 5 garages in a row, and still more were needed. This just doesn't fit into the game well.
Sorry folks, I built the hospital
backwards.
You cannot move buildings once they are
placed, you have to demolish them and re-build. When you are in
building mode, you can't zoom in and out or turn. So it's hard to
tell if you are building facing the right way. Buildings with their
own garages must be built facing a road with their garages connected
by a green arrow. In many views it's hard to see this and I ended up
having to take down perfectly good buildings just because no one can
park there.
I have decreed that we need a bus
system on this island. Why do you not listen?
There is no bus service, and no on
island transportation other than roads. Bus service would have been a
great addition and much more realistic than building a parking garage
for every other building. But don't listen to me, I'm just the
dictator.
If variety is the spice of life,
Tropico is bland
The buildings are all very cool
looking. They must have spent some time studying the architecture of
Cuba. Unfortunately there is usually only one style of each
building, so when you build a pub, it is the same as every other pub
on the island. You can choose to make it a nicer pub with a dress
code, but it's still the exact same look. There is only one type of
market where people can buy food. They should have made several
levels – one could be a no frills market, then there could be a
nicer middle class one and a fancy tourist market.
There are slight variations in some of
the houses – if you build two apartment blocks they will look
similar but be different heights. The condos have more variety. But
it's really not enough.
There are not enough types of
businesses. On the build menu, there is an “entertainment”
section with twelve types of businesses ranging from a pub to a giant
revolving restaurant. But most of the entertainment is big ticket
items like shopping malls and zoos that you can only build once you
are running a big profit. You also need a lot of room for the big
entertainment.
They should have made a lot of smaller
businesses like taco stands and little shops. This is more in line
with the economy in countries like the ones that this game is based
on. Smaller businesses would be easier to place in the city.
You can beautify the area with a small
assortment of trees, statues, gardens and fountains. Watch out
though! The decorations can't be demolished, and you can't build
over them. I put a bunch of gardens around the palace, and when I
wanted to get rid of them to build other things I couldn't. It
really messed up my downtown area on one of my games. I don't know
if there was a problem with my game or they just didn't think things
through. If there was a wider variety of decorations, and you could
move them around I would have liked this game better.
The true wealth of a country is
people
Your citizens walk and drive around
Tropico. You can click on them and see what they are thinking, how
happy they are and what they want. You get stats on their job,
house, spouse and children, and a brief rundown of activities they
have been doing.
Almost all of my people had the same
two complaints. They didn't have access to a church when they wanted
to pray and there was nowhere on the island to buy luxury goods. Ok,
so I thought I had enough religious outlets with two churches and a
Cathedral for 200 people. I built more and more churches and another
Cathedral. People were still unhappy.
I had to wait a while to build the mall
but I thought that would take care of the luxury goods problem. I
saved a prime location for the mall and put a parking garage on
either side of it. Actually almost no one went to the mall and
people still whined about their poor shopping choices. There's no
other shopping that you can build. I was annoyed.
Another problem was the food supply. I
kept building more farms, but I had a hard time getting enough people
to work on them, even after raising wages. I also built markets all
over to distribute the food. Every year I would get messages that
people had died of starvation. Gee, maybe they should have worked on
my farms.
What do you mean you're unhappy?
I tried in all three games to make the
citizens happy. I built farms, I built hospitals, I raised wages. I
built electric plants and gave my people air conditioning. I gave
them free housing. I never got above 54 percent happiness rating.
I'm sure that if I devoted a lot of time to this game I could get a
higher percent but by that point I was bored and not motivated to do
research.
Of course this is a free country.
Every so often you will have elections.
You have to try to get people's support by issuing edicts that will
please them. You can attract religious supporters by having the Pope
show up or by banning contraception. You attract environmentalists
by banning pollution, though this pisses off the capitalists. You
can make all housing free, but this will take a heavy toll on your
treasury. So it's a balancing act.
You can also cheat on the elections or
get rid of elections altogether, which really stirs the rebels up.
Bring it on, rebels!
When people are unhappy they will start
with peaceful protests and then turn rebel. You have the opportunity
to deal with this in various ways, by bribery, having them killed,
putting them in prison or branding them a heretic. It's disturbingly
satisfying to order protestors killed after trying so hard to please
the ingrates. This was the only point I felt emotionally connected
with the game at all.
Rebels will attack when their numbers
become big enough. In one of my games the rebels attacked a mine,
which means about 7 of them stood around and waved their guns while
the miners calmly went about their tasks. The army ran on foot all
the way across the island to meet them, which took a long time. We
have cars and could have been there quickly. It seemed very silly to
run across the island.
Your army can also rebel against you
and take you down in a coup. This happened in my first game, where I
survived the rebel attack but my army took over and I had to pack up
and flee to Florida. Game over.
I'm a city planner, not a fighter
For my second and third games I was a
much more careful manager and built up a strong and happy army. I
managed to make a lot of money with exports and tourism. In my
second game I lost a lot of money trying to please various factions
though and got bored at around 600 population in the early 1980s.
That is where the rebels started to pop up with increasing frequency.
I started another game. I did better
financially in my third game but again got bored around 1980.
To some people the best part of the
game would be putting down rebels with the secret police, building
prisons, proclaiming Martial law. I just wasn't into that. I wanted
to build transportation systems not a totalitarian government.
It's more interesting to be poor and
hopeful
I usually find these games a lot more
fun at the beginning when you are setting everything up. It's
exhilarating when you turn the corner and you start making a profit
and have extra money to play with. Then you have tons of money and
can do just about anything. It becomes monotonous. So I was actually
kind of glad that you can lose the game by losing a rebel war or coup
and start over.
Crash!
I got to the point where I was ready to
quit my third game and uninstall it. I took an aerial photo of the
island for this review – and the game crashed. I had noticed there
was a lag when taking photos before so I think this must be a weak
point of the game.
That was the only crash. The rest of
the time the game was as smooth as the flavored rum that was
Tropico's most profitable export.
Was it worth it?
At $39.00, not quite. I didn't get
nearly as much enjoyment out of this game as I have with other less
expensive games. I don't feel ripped off, just kind of meh. If I
had to do it again I would wait until the price dropped,or buy
Tropico 3. Many reviewers who played both 3 and 4 have said there
is not that much difference between the versions and you can buy the
version of Tropico 3 with the expansion pack for only $14.99 on
Steam.
I would buy an expansion pack for
Tropico 4 if it added more types of businesses, transportation and
housing options.
In a word: Bland
I never developed an emotional
connection with this game. I didn't care if my dictator character
got deposed or when people died from starvation. I felt a little
annoyed when people were unhappy despite my best efforts, but that
was it. The whole game seemed a bit shallow – not a great city
builder, not a great strategy game but not terrible either. It was
amusing enough for four days and now I'm ready to put it away.
