16 Jul

Tropico 3

Filed under: PC Games 2 Responses

Humble beginnings give rise to a prosperous island nation.

The last citybuilder game that I played was the very mediocre Civcity: Rome last year, so I’ve been looking forward to something more substantial in Tropico 3. This wasn’t a game that I originally intended to buy and I’ve never played any of its predecessors, but it was on sale on Steam, looked like a cool citybuilder and was even made by a QT3 member, so I snapped it up.

As “El Presidente”, the dictator of a banana republic in the Carribean, your goal is to build up the island nation of Tropico and take every measure necessary to remain in power while stuffing your secret Swiss bank account with ill-gotten gains. The main game consists of a series of fifteen scenarios, each with unique goals and different islands to play on. In addition, there’s also a sandbox mode and online challenges made by other players that you can download.

Gameplay is pretty standard citybuilder fare. You choose a building that you want from the menu, make sure that you have enough money to pay for it, and plop it down somewhere on the map. Then your builders will come along and you can watch it being built brick by brick. There’s no need to manage building materials in this game as everything is paid for using cash. Some buildings do require electricity to be supplied before they can be built but, other than money, the main consideration is having enough qualified workers to make the building work. Farms and construction offices only require uneducated laborers for example, but hospitals require college graduates.

There’s a pirate costume available in the avatar creation screen so naturally I made a pirate president and named him Jack Sparrow.

The entire island and everything in it is modeled in 3D, down to the trees and individual inhabitants. Like in the Sims games, each of your Tropicans has a unique name and history. They have various wants that have to be fulfilled, for example, going to a church fulfills their need for religion, and individual preferences. You can click on them to see what they’re thinking and follow them around as they travel around the island to do various tasks. This can be quite amusing as you can see priests visiting the cabaret for example. They can get married and spawn little Tropican kids. They can get an education to get better jobs and even become more skilled at their jobs over time. It’s all quite detailed.

Even your president is represented by an avatar in the game. At the beginning of every game you can select one of the pre-made characters, some based on historical figures like Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet, or create one of your own. Each avatar has traits that affect gameplay. An economic genius, for example, increases production in all factories while an alcoholic is less respected by Tropicans but more liked by the USSR. Yes, one of the aspects you must manage is your country’s relationship with the US and the USSR. If they like you, you get financial aid every year. If they hate you, they might invade your Tropico and put an end to your dictatorship.

Once in-game, you can take direct control of your avatar and have him travel around the island. You can visit most buildings to give it a temporary bonus or stay at a construction site so that the builders will finish the building faster. Inevitably protests will flare up and you can send your president to placate the lead protester and defuse the situation. When the rebels attack, your president will even pull out a pistol and join in the battle. If you need a quick boost in your respect rating, you can stand on the balcony of your palace and give a speech.

A container ship departing with a full load of Tropican goods.

Tropico is basically run as a command economy. You set the wages for every job and the rental rates for all housing. There are basically two ways to make money: either export goods or attract tourists and encourage them to spend money in Tropico. Which method to use depends on your island and the scenario. Islands that have oil deposits and gold seams for example will naturally earn lots of money by exporting while beautiful islands with nice beaches and ancient ruins but few natural resources will need to specialize in tourism. Of course, all islands will still need to provide sufficient food for their citizens through farming or fishing.

Apart from money, you will also need to manage your citizens’ happiness and respect ratings. Happiness depends on how well you are able to satisfy their needs. In addition to the previously mentioned religion and food needs, there are also factors such as housing and job quality, entertainment, the environment and liberty to consider. Each citizen also belongs to one or more factions, such as the Communists, the Militarists and the Nationalists etc. and how much each faction respects you depends on your policies. The Nationalists hate immigrants for example and will disrespect you if you have an open-door policy but it is next to impossible to have enough citizens to do anything without allowing immigration.

If your citizens get too rowdy, you have a number of tools at your disposal depending on the buildings you’re built. If you have a bank, you can use it to bribe the faction leaders to respect you more. If you have a secret police, you can “arrange accidents” for dissidents who make trouble for you. From time to time your citizens will clamor for an election and you’re forced to hold one. You can give a speech and choose speech topics and promises to hopefully persuade more citizens to vote for you. If push comes to shove, you can even commit election fraud as losing an election automatically means losing the scenario.

Rich foreigners staying in Tropico as tourists. You need to maximize your income by making them spend every dime in their pockets before they leave.

Finally, you have the secret Swiss bank account. Corruption turns out to be harder than I’d thought as you can’t just transfer cash from the national treasury to your personal account willy-nilly. One thing you can do is to issue a “Building Permits” edict which acts like a tax on all construction in Tropico with the proceeds going to your personal account. If you have a bank, you can set it to embezzle some money every month. Occasionally, you also get events in which a donor might offer to fund a new police station or a new school and you can instead choose to divert the money for own purpose. This money serves to directly boost your score at the end of the scenario.

The events can have other effects too of course. Sometimes a hurricane strikes your island and demolishes some of your buildings. Dissidents can plant bombs in your factories and as I’ve said earlier, if the rebels on your island outnumber your military, they will launch attacks. If the Militarists get too unhappy, you might even experience a coup attempt. All of this conveyed in the same tongue-in-cheek humor that permeates the entire game.  A toadying deejay from Tropico News Today keeps up a running commentary on developments and your actions on the island.

All told, while Tropico 3 is a pretty cool take on the genre and a very satisfying game, it falls some way short of being truly great. Its main problem is that its economic model is too simple and makes it too easy to reach a stable equilibrium. In the beginning of each scenario, the happiness level of your citizens will slowly fall as you lack the facilities to satisfy their needs but once you’ve built a solid income engine and have a large enough population base to work with, it’s easy to build the necessary facilities one by one and it’s smooth sailing from then on. Making everyone happy is quite straightforward as there are no real trade-offs, so far from being an evil dictator, every election ends up being a landslide victory in your favor.

It’s pretty amazing how close in the game allows you to zoom.

The only real challenge is adapting your building plan to the geography of the current island and dealing with the vagaries of the scripted events in each scenario. Some of these can be quite a pain to deal with, but in a cheap way that is unsatisfying to play. In one scenario for example, you start off with some oil wells that promise good income but soon afterward an event happens that makes them go dry. Mostly however, the included scenarios are quite easy to complete and you might even get bored at how similar the scenarios end up being. The sandbox mode isn’t really interesting either as there’s not enough scope to make very different island nations. It’s cool to see your first island boom from being a nation of corn farmers to luxury hotels, casinos and factories, but you basically build every island in the same way.

The detail and quality of the graphics did surprise me and I enjoyed being able to zoom in close to see what the Tropicans were doing. Still, the production quality isn’t quite top notch and there are odd problems.  There isn’t enough variety in the radio commentary for example and you soon get tired of hearing the same lame jokes again and again. Building roads is also harder and more frustrating than it should be. Sometimes the graphics show an area that looks like you should be able to build on, but you fail when you try to do it due to uneven terrain.

This means that while I can wholeheartedly endorse this as a fine citybuilder, I still find myself pining for something truly great. A worthy sequel of the Simcity games for example, with all the space and freedom to build that the series is known for, would be just the ticket. In the meantime, you could do much worse than satisfy your craving with Tropico 3.

Written on July 16 2010 and is filed under PC Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Tropico 3”

Roo

This is a good game which I’ve played recently. I like these kinda city building game, which satisfied my desire to be an El Presidente. Yes, it will be quite boring after a lot of play due to its simple and linear strategy.

wankongyew

I don’t think I feel like El Presidente playing this game. After all, I expect a dictator to live a life of luxury. In this game, all I ever do is run around overseeing construction projects, making sure that farms and factories operate at maximum efficiency, conduct state visits of schools, colleges and armories etc. Everyone else in Tropico get time off to sleep, eat, have fun and go to church, but El Presidente gets no time off at all. I’m the hardest working person in Tropico. Some dictator I am!

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