Tropico 5

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. The changes between Tropico 3 and 4 weren’t that drastic, and some changes were good improvements whereas a couple of areas caused problems. The introduction of Elementary School caused a bit of a bottleneck with the education of your citizens. I think that could have been solved by increasing the capacity, or prompting you to build more. Instead, Tropico 5 removes the building.

That’s only one of many changes here. Tropico 5 sees drastic changes. So although the game looks similar and has many of the initial buildings, the game requires a different strategy and flows differently over time.

This is due to the introduction of an “era” system. You start off in the Colonial era under the service of the “Crown”, until you can buy your independence. You then go through World War II, the Cold War, and into the Modern era. In each era, you gain access to new research, buildings and edicts.

This change slows the game down and restricts what you can build in the early game. When you begin the game, you can’t even build mines, until you put down the Library and gain a few research points. This doesn’t take long though, but it was always the first thing I did. Mines are now visually represented as caves and are always found in the cliff-sides.

In the previous Campaign, you started on a new island each time and played until you reached a main objective, with many sub objectives given to you over time. This time, the campaign alternates between 2 islands and your progress carries over between missions. Towards the end, you are given missions on another 2 alternating islands. I thought this was a nice idea since it gives you continuity but a bit of variety too.

The objective system remains, giving you mini-targets to aim for as you play. Meeting them gives you rewards such as: more faction respect, money into your bank balance, money offshore account, new trade deals, or free buildings. 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. The main campaign missions do have time limits.

In the previous games, you were battling the needs of different factions like Nationalist, Capitalist, Intellectual, Religious, Miltarian, Environmentalist among others. Even though your citizens still have some kind of ideology and have various needs and interests, this feature didn’t seem important at all; you just need to meet basic needs to keep people happy.

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, and have the opportunity to fix the votes by a small margin. The election speech feature has been removed so you can no longer make promises to target certain ideologies to sway the votes.

You can click individuals to check on their needs. You can view overall stats in the “almanac”, and this has been revised again since Tropico 4. I found the new layout a bit hard to get used to as the location for info has drastically changed.

You still maintain relations with other nations, and the available nations change by the era. Early on it’s US and USSR, and during World War, it’s Axis and Alliance. If you raise your relations high enough, you can declare an allegiance in which you are then immune from such invasions. Your relationship impacts trade deals for export/import resources, and foreign aid.

My general strategy was: lay down some farms and mines to secure future income. Next build clinics, churches, schools, pubs etc to increase happiness. Invest in large blocks of houses. 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, pineapples, tobacco, sugar and a few others; but each requires different levels of humidity and elevation. You also need a large space in order for the crops to grow. In Tropico 5, this space is clearly illustrated, whereas it was just guesswork in previous games.

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. This was a feature I didn’t actually use in Tropico 5, but I used it a lot in previous games.

For the more advanced buildings, you need a power source like the power plant first. Wind Turbines have been removed, but now you have a Geothermal Plant which is effective if there is a volcano on your island.

After you build one of the hotel variations, tourists will come if you have a selection of Entertainment buildings, or Luxury attractions. Such examples include cabaret, sports centre, hang-gliding, cinema and casino.

In Tropico 4, there were loads of buildings that seemed to be added to flaunt your cash, although they did bring benefits too. These have been removed, so there’s no more Christ Statue or Mausoleum.

There are loads of new “Edicts”, which are policies that have varying effects. Tropico 4 restricted these by the Ministers you had employed at the Ministry. This feature has also been removed. Now edicts are just restricted by era and research.

In previous Tropico games, some buildings allowed you to pay a set fee to add an upgrade. This feature has been expanded to more buildings, and some of these give bonuses to surrounding buildings. So you can place a Cattle Ranch near your farms to give them a productivity boost via fertilizers. You can still increase/lower wages to increase job satisfaction, however, now you just have 5 options rather than being able to specify the exact amount.

Most buildings can also be assigned a Manager. These are citizens with special skills which are the same traits that the dictators have. So you can gain production/wage/happiness bonuses to any worker in the building.

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. Many more buildings require to be hooked up the roads, so this now includes farms and ranches.

In previous games, garages were very important to allow for effective transportation. These essentially acted like bus stops. In Tropico 5, the replacement “Parking Lot” are available at a much later era, are much smaller in size, and don’t seem as necessary.

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 groceries, and teamsters will deliver it.

Another new feature is the Dynasty system. This is essentially your family, and you can nominate someone to run for President when the elections come around. You can use the same character all the way through if you wish, but may wish to switch to get a different bonus. In previous games, your “Swiss Bank Account” was just used for score, but now can be used to upgrade your skills.

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 found Tropico 4 to be much easier than Tropico 3, and I found Tropico 5 slightly harder than 4. The main challenge in Tropico 5 was to get used to the new systems, and there were some tricky time-limits on some missions. It’s nice that they tried to bring new ideas to the table, but it’s disappointing that they took so much away.