Tropico 4

Tropico is a city building simulation game like SimCity, but with a dictator theme. You construct your city on an island, and aim to please your citizen’s various expectations. People belong to some kind of ideology like Nationalist, Capitalist, Intellectual, Religious, Miltarian, Environmentalist among others, and it’s (almost) impossible to please everyone; at least in the early game.

Your dictator has a physical presence and he can be moved to buildings to speed construction, or give speeches. He also has some strengths and weaknesses which naturally favour/annoy certain ideologies. You can switch your character between the missions to attempt to pick traits that favour that scenario. There’s a large list of stock characters but you can also create your own.

It’s extremely important to make people happy for many reasons. If you want the population to rise to grow your economy, then you need immigrants to come in, and your current residents to stay. As your population grows, you need to create more jobs, and more housing. Unhappy residents can also become Rebels, who will attack a building (often the mines), or even your palace. If your palace is destroyed, then the mission is failed.

There are elections every several years or so, depending on the mission (or depending on if you dictate that there are no elections). You need to have enough popularity, or at least make promises that appeal to your citizens in order for them to vote for an extended stay. You do have the option of fixing the votes by a small margin.

You can click individuals to check on their needs. You can view overall stats in the “almanac”, and this has been revised since Tropico 3. I found it much easier to see how many unemployed, homeless and available jobs in these statistics.

You also have to maintain relations with other nations, primarily the US or USSR. They will like you if you show capitalist or communist approaches respectively. If your relations become too low, then they can “invade” and the mission is failed (although this never happened to me). If you raise your relations high enough, you can declare an allegiance in which you are then immune from such invasions. In Tropico 4, you also maintain relations with China, EU and the Middle East. This has an effect on the export/import system which is one of the new features. Now you have the option of importing resources instead of collecting it yourself. So for example, if you import gold, you can use that in your Jewelry Factory, and export Jewelry to make a profit. If your relationship with them is too low, then they can refuse to trade with you.

My general strategy was: lay down some farms and mines to secure future income, and place down houses. Then build clinics, churches, schools, pubs etc to increase happiness. Depending on the “threat” level, I may invest in the police or army, before moving to a more balanced strategy. Higher sums of cash can be brought in by investing in the Factories which add value to your raw materials.

Farms can grow all kinds of products; corn, payapas, tobacco, sugar and a few others; but each requires different levels of humidity and elevation. You need a bit of space in order for the crops to grow.

Some buildings require educated workers which are labelled “High School” or “College”. You can pay a fee to import a skilled immigrant, where the cost increases with each hire. You can build your own High School or College, but the initial employees most likely need to be brought in. A new building in Tropico 4 is the Grade School which educates children. I think this has a big impact in the game, because if you don’t get enough educated kids through the system, then you will limit the amount of High School graduates, which limits your college graduates. The number of kids you end up having in your population is very high, which often meant I had around a 5:1 ratio of Grade School to High Schools. It is important to keep an eye on the capacity of your schools to ensure you don’t cap your growth.

For the more advanced buildings, you need a power source like the power plant first. In Tropico 4, Wind Turbines are a more eco-friendly option but generate a smaller amount of power, which also depends on the elevation of the land.

There’s also loads of tourism buildings which the prerequisite is either the “Tourist Dock” or the more expensive “Airport”. After this you need to build one of the hotel variations, and tourists will come if you have a selection of Entertainment buildings, or Luxury attractions. Such examples include zoos, a rollercoaster, sports centre, balloon ride, cinema and casino.

There’s quite a few new buildings in Tropico 4, with quite a few that are there to flaunt your cash such as the Mausoleum which allows you to put the tourist takings into your offshore account, or the Christ statue that is a religious and tourist landmark.

In Tropico 4, many buildings require you to own the blueprint first. This can be purchased, but some missions will block you until you complete some kind of objective. Sometimes you can get them free with some optional objectives. Also, you can build a research center which lowers the cost of blueprints over time.

There are loads of “Edicts” which are policies that have varying effects. One of them is corrupt where buildings are more expensive, but the extra money goes in your “Swiss Bank Account”. This gives you extra points, and is sometimes used in the mission objective. This time, you need a Ministry and employ different Ministers to be able to activate some of these Edicts. So the Foreign Minister allows you to sign an allegiance with the superpowers. The Interior Minister allows you to use the Secret Police.

With each building, there’s not much scope for micromanagement. Many buildings have an option for focus (usually 2 options) which may tweak efficiency and staff happiness. You can also set the wages, which increase job satisfaction. Some buildings can be upgraded e.g increase production by 20%.

You need to place roads to allow efficient transport. Some buildings require roads to function properly, whereas other buildings can be placed away from them. Roads can be straight, or you can place arcing roads if you wish, which is sometimes necessary to get around rocky areas. In Tropico 4, sometimes the roads are dirt roads but I wasn’t sure when it chose to place these, and if there was any advantage or disadvantage to them. Maybe it was decided by expected traffic level.

You can place garages, which in some ways, act like bus stops. It seems that people in Tropico are ferried around in Taxis. All produce needs to be shipped to the docks which is the job of “teamsters”. People need food, so will visit the farms to collect it. Alternatively, you can build marketplaces, and teamsters will deliver it.

A new feature is that the Faction leaders now pop-up with suggested targets and meeting them gives you more faction respect, and sometimes money into your bank balance or offshore account. I liked these mini-objectives because it always gave you something to strive for. I think they should have made some of them timed missions to increase the difficulty and urgency.

In Tropico 3, I found that the beginning of each mission is tough, but once you get a fully functioning economy, then it’s usually just a matter of time until you are victorious. The challenge is raising funds to create enough jobs and housing for people. Then the next challenge is to suppress any kind of challenge to your rule; be it from rebels, US/USSR, or via election. In Tropico 4, I never had any threat from other countries, even though you now need a Ministry and employ a Minister (which requires a citizen with certain skills) before you can choose an alliance. This obviously costs more money and takes more time, but most missions I never even chose an alliance; both the US/USSR seemed happy at my management.

I found Tropico 4 to be much easier as it often throws money at you early on so you don’t have the slow start and constant threat of hostile rebellions like in the previous game. Even though there’s more buildings that you need which will mean you need more money - the increase in money means you are mainly stalled by your build speed.

Natural disasters seem a common occurrence in the missions, but they didn’t really make much impact on me. Sure, they destroy a few buildings, but you always get a lump of cash as “foreign aid” which covers most of the damage. The thing that annoyed me about them is that the “cutscene” often took too long, and it repositions your camera, which means you have to manually find your preferred rotation and zoom level.

The graphics are much sharper and more colourful, so I prefer this aesthetically over Tropico 3.

Tropico is one of those games where you end up playing it for hours. Time goes whizzing by and it’s great to see the island develop from a few basic buildings to a sprawling city. I appreciate the new buildings and the addition of objectives. I think the addition of the Grade School slows down your education system, and I think the tweaks in difficulty means it is a bit easy. This could be down to the fact that I played Tropico 3 recently, so went into this game understanding the majority of the mechanics and strategy. Maybe it isn’t easy for new players though.

I think overall, I probably enjoyed the game as much as Tropico 3 and I still plan on playing the other games in the series to see how the game has progressed.