#TROPICO 4 VS.TROPICO 5 SERIES#

By making them happier, and providing merchants to kit them out with cutlasses and parrots, you increased the potency of the pirate fleet, who in turn would be more successful and bring back more loot. You provided a safe port and various ‘services’ to pirates who would go out, plunder the seas and bring back their treasure to spend and store on the island. Unlike all the others, which take place primarily between the Cold War and today, Tropico 2 was set during the golden age of piracy.Įssentially you played the role of a pirate king. In hindsight, Tropico 2 is very much the odd one out in the series.

Tropico 2 – completely different look and setting to the rest of the series. I would just get these random cravings to play one or two games, and then put it away for another couple of months. The combination of a quick, deep game that just felt perfect made Tropico being what I described as a “booty call” game. Unfortunately, that significance of individual citizens was also the source of the game’s biggest frustrations, as an entire regime could be brought down because Pedro the 48 year old teamster died of a heart attack while pushing his wheelbarrow containing two years of cigar production down to the docks. This made you care, to a ridiculous degree, about Rupert’s daily life. If that meant he wasn’t around when the trade ship came in, well, he’d help out on the next one. Rupert the dockworker was going to go to the pub, go home, go to church and get his shots at the clinic no matter what. In keeping with the island feel, Tropico managed to capture the idea of lazy tropical island life. Your problems might also be much smaller. None of these were preset challenges or scenarios, they were just what happened to occur due to whatever area of the island’s development needs you weren’t quite able to keep up on. Most feared of all was trying to wrestle control over the economy back from the World Bank, who insisted on taking control of citizen wages (and hence general happiness) if the island went too far in the red. These might include winning a string of elections through micromanaging faction politics or dealing with rebels who would hide out in the jungles before attacking your favourite cigar factory. Rather than gaming everything to min-max your economy and work out the perfect build order for everything, you instead would spend the whole game dealing with a list of strangely realistic problems. This gave the game an amazing truthiness, you really felt like you were running a small, petty little island. With such a small population you seldom had enough time, money or construction workers to build everything the game had to offer. It felt like everyone and their family mattered. Your island and population were also very small, around 200-600 citizens. Unlike other similar games which could go for weeks, a game of Tropico was a pleasant 3-4 hours.

You needed to find ways to keep enough of them happy to survive regular elections, or risk being voted, Survivor style, off the island and into an instant game-over failure. Every one of these migrants had needs, a family and political leanings And so began your political problems. As your island took off, immigrants would arrive looking to take advantage of the jobs and general idyllic lifestyle offered by your tropical paradise. You were forced to adapt your approach to economic growth in each game based on the skills of your dictator and the available resources of the island.

Your final score was based on not only how big and wealthy your island was, but also how much you managed to stash away in your Swiss bank account. You picked a historical dictator (or created one of your own complete with backstory, talents and flaws) and tried to survive ruling a Caribbean island, complete with lush plants and impeccable Cuban music for the allotted 50 years. Tropico was from the makers of Railroad Tycoon and came into that market offering a quirky island version of a sandbox management sim. Games like Sim City, The Sims, Railroad Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon were all serious franchises that dominated shelves and discussions.

#TROPICO 4 VS.TROPICO 5 SERIES#

It’s important to remember that the Tropico series dates back to a time when building/management sims were actually AAA games. The taverns of Tropico, Top left – Tropico, top right – Tropico 2, bottom left – Tropico 3, bottom right Tropico 4 Tropico – 2001

Tropico 4 vs.tropico 5