Review: Tropico 4
Sep. 14th, 2012 07:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pktechgirlbackupTropico 4 is basically Tropico 1 with a few fiddly bits added and better graphics. That's okay; Tropico was a good game, and I have gotten used to the inferior UI of 4. I'm told the Modern Times expansion pack differentiates it, but the only reason I own a game as new as T4 is that it was a birthday gift, you will never convince me to pay that much for a game. Tropico (any iteration) is mostly an economy management game in which you play the dictator of a banana republic, trying to develop your economy while fulfilling your populace's need for religion, medicine, and booze.
I enjoy the game, despite never quite seeing eye to eye with it. I like the challenge of the delicate balance of having enough people of the right sex with the right education level. The game keeps dumping new people on me and I don't think there's anyway to get education such that a real number of high schools produces new graduates at exactly the rate they keep dying off. The game is also obsessed with the size of my swiss bank account, and I just don't care.
distinguishes itself from other economy games by being lumpy. You don't get paid the second you manufacture something. You have to wait until a boat picks it up from the dock, but it won't even get to the dock until your teamsters pick it up from the building that created it. If you have a multi-stage supply chain (and g-d knows I love me some multi stage supply chains) and some bad luck, it could be decades before you get paid for a piece of wood. But your workers are paid immediately, so you have to keep a cushion with which to pay them. This is not a particular problem in the early game, because you get annual foreign aid and are allowed to go into debt. But neither of those numbers scale with your payroll. If your teamsters miss a high-payout export for a few months in a row- which is trivial to do- you can end up in game-destroying debt. Especially if there's a natural disaster as well. You can try to fix this by hiring more teamsters, but it doesn't actually earn you more money.
The other solution is to incorporate an industry that generates smooth payouts and isn't dependent on teamsters: tourism. I don't know how much of my prejudice against tourism is that it took forever to be profitable in the original, and how much is the absence of intricate supply chains, but I wouldn't otherwise be very interested in tourism. The jobs are low quality, it's a pain to keep the workers happy without exposing the tourists to local color, and the money isn't that good. But it's steady.
This is but the best example of some really thoughtful game design in Tropico. It's not a thrill-a-minute game, but it is solid.
I enjoy the game, despite never quite seeing eye to eye with it. I like the challenge of the delicate balance of having enough people of the right sex with the right education level. The game keeps dumping new people on me and I don't think there's anyway to get education such that a real number of high schools produces new graduates at exactly the rate they keep dying off. The game is also obsessed with the size of my swiss bank account, and I just don't care.
distinguishes itself from other economy games by being lumpy. You don't get paid the second you manufacture something. You have to wait until a boat picks it up from the dock, but it won't even get to the dock until your teamsters pick it up from the building that created it. If you have a multi-stage supply chain (and g-d knows I love me some multi stage supply chains) and some bad luck, it could be decades before you get paid for a piece of wood. But your workers are paid immediately, so you have to keep a cushion with which to pay them. This is not a particular problem in the early game, because you get annual foreign aid and are allowed to go into debt. But neither of those numbers scale with your payroll. If your teamsters miss a high-payout export for a few months in a row- which is trivial to do- you can end up in game-destroying debt. Especially if there's a natural disaster as well. You can try to fix this by hiring more teamsters, but it doesn't actually earn you more money.
The other solution is to incorporate an industry that generates smooth payouts and isn't dependent on teamsters: tourism. I don't know how much of my prejudice against tourism is that it took forever to be profitable in the original, and how much is the absence of intricate supply chains, but I wouldn't otherwise be very interested in tourism. The jobs are low quality, it's a pain to keep the workers happy without exposing the tourists to local color, and the money isn't that good. But it's steady.
This is but the best example of some really thoughtful game design in Tropico. It's not a thrill-a-minute game, but it is solid.
