SHORT...ish game review: Tropico 3
Posted: 21 Jan 2010, 22:53
I've been waiting for a fix for my city-building addiction ever since Sim City 4 came out with the blockbuster combination of instability with no auto-save function.
Tropico 3, while not allowing you to operate on as grand a scale as Sim City, allows you a lot more detail and closer interaction with your virtual people. It would be no small accomplishment to attain a population of 1000 and have a functioning economy to support that many people. You have to worry about your peoples' basic needs: food, housing, healthcare, entertainment. All of these cost you, as the dictator, money to provide. You can make a small amount of the money back by charging tax on housing, but if you charge too much people will opt to build shacks to live in instead. Housing tax, in reality, has a very different function that's often overlooked: it allows you to provide housing that only the rich and powerful (ie, your private army) can afford, which plays a big part in keeping you in power.
In order to provide these services, you must make money by manufacturing exportable goods or providing tourist services. For example, a typical economy might work like this: export furniture, which is built from wood that came from a lumber mill, which got wood from a lumberjack camp, which got workers from nearby housing, which got food from the nearby market, which got food from some teamsters, who brought fish from the fisherman's dock on the other side of the island, etc.
At the same time, you must keep your people adequately satisfied with their way of life that they don't force you out of power, either by election, or rebellion (if you aren't providing elections/fair elections), or coup (if you aren't keeping the guys with guns happy, or foreign takeover (if you aren't playing nice with the US/USSR), etc.
My biggest complaint with the game is something that isn't exactly the game's fault: I don't often find it to be hard enough, and there's not enough motivation to be evil. And even if you do choose to, say, execute everyone on the island that doesn't support you, there aren't any real repercussions as long as you keep paid up with the right people. A mirror of real life, I suppose. Rather than a simple "easy, medium, hard" setting, the game allows you to configure your in-game avatar's personality and quirks. These things affect how difficult the game will be for you, and offer a very dynamic way of adjusting difficulty to suit your taste. It could very easily be dismissed as a minor game feature rather than what it really is, the difficulty setting.
I enjoy Tropico 3 very much and I think if you enjoy city-building games then you should give it a look.
Tropico 3, while not allowing you to operate on as grand a scale as Sim City, allows you a lot more detail and closer interaction with your virtual people. It would be no small accomplishment to attain a population of 1000 and have a functioning economy to support that many people. You have to worry about your peoples' basic needs: food, housing, healthcare, entertainment. All of these cost you, as the dictator, money to provide. You can make a small amount of the money back by charging tax on housing, but if you charge too much people will opt to build shacks to live in instead. Housing tax, in reality, has a very different function that's often overlooked: it allows you to provide housing that only the rich and powerful (ie, your private army) can afford, which plays a big part in keeping you in power.
In order to provide these services, you must make money by manufacturing exportable goods or providing tourist services. For example, a typical economy might work like this: export furniture, which is built from wood that came from a lumber mill, which got wood from a lumberjack camp, which got workers from nearby housing, which got food from the nearby market, which got food from some teamsters, who brought fish from the fisherman's dock on the other side of the island, etc.
At the same time, you must keep your people adequately satisfied with their way of life that they don't force you out of power, either by election, or rebellion (if you aren't providing elections/fair elections), or coup (if you aren't keeping the guys with guns happy, or foreign takeover (if you aren't playing nice with the US/USSR), etc.
My biggest complaint with the game is something that isn't exactly the game's fault: I don't often find it to be hard enough, and there's not enough motivation to be evil. And even if you do choose to, say, execute everyone on the island that doesn't support you, there aren't any real repercussions as long as you keep paid up with the right people. A mirror of real life, I suppose. Rather than a simple "easy, medium, hard" setting, the game allows you to configure your in-game avatar's personality and quirks. These things affect how difficult the game will be for you, and offer a very dynamic way of adjusting difficulty to suit your taste. It could very easily be dismissed as a minor game feature rather than what it really is, the difficulty setting.
I enjoy Tropico 3 very much and I think if you enjoy city-building games then you should give it a look.