Dictators juggle. The good ones provide destructive industry on the richest land while appeasing environmentalists with monuments built to suit their fancy. They declare edicts and talk to their people on the ground. They rig elections, build roads, snuff resistance, balance budgets, smooth diplomatic tensions and create schools.
Bad ones forget to build farms that produce food instead of tobacco, or choose to neglect core cultural factions. Terrible, wretched, no-good dictators may even piss off the United States so much that She invades their tiny paradise.
These are some of the things I’ve learned while playing the PC version ofTropico 3, a city management and builder simulation due out this October. And while I feel like I have a solid foundation, you’ll find out after the break, that I still don’t know enough.
Hit it for our pseudo-preview.
Many hard lessons were punched into my head during my play sessions ofTropico 3, but above all, I learned that being a dictator isn’t easy. This game puts players in the shoes of one of their choosing — either famous like Fidel Castro or a created character — and challenges them with creating a stable government and making people cheerful. Loaded with menus and various information-laden doodads, this is a true city builder.
It plays like this: a dictator — Fidel Castro, for me — who lives in a stunning capitol building surrounded by shanty houses is told by a trusted advisor to take the reigns of a deformed banana republic island and turn it into a thriving place. It starts with a few farms — corn, papaya, and bananas, among other things. People need to eat and product needs to be shipped to generate revenue. Gradually, money is made and that revenue can be used to create other industry — lumber, mining, canned foods and a few other things. As more peasants populate the island, the need for housing — apartment buildings, double-decker shanty houses — and infrastructure such as roads is made apparent.
As the civilization continues to grow, people will desire entertainment and places to practice religion. Religion is especially important, but it requires the building of school or the importation of educated people, which costs quite a bit of cash.
And while all this is going on, the political world calls, specifically with demands to be met or desires of the U.S.S.R. or the United States.
I’ve played the game for roughly 10 hours and about six of those were learning the ins and outs of the menus. There’s a lot of stuff to digest, specifically when it comes to the nuance of pleasing certain factions within the island — nationalists, zealots, or even teamsters who transport food. The catch is thatnotmonitoring these activities — or even the basic ones like, say, feeding people — can have dire consequences. People can rebel and displace you, or nations can encircle the island with heavy gun ships and eventually attack, ending your career early.
I lost my job quite a bit.
If the previous paragraphs weren’t any indication, here’s a clear point: there’s a lot of stuff going down on the little island, and it’s up to you to manage it all — from the construction of a new school, down to issuing edicts that can please people and smooth diplomatic relations with an empire.
So, no, it’s not easy being a dictator. I can’t juggle yet and I look forward to continuing my play. I simply don’t understand all the building blocks of the game and I don’t know if I should blame it or myself for my lack of success.
For reference here, I’m struggling with the second campaign mission. The two campaign missions I’ve played are basic affairs: build a city and accomplish an objective with a certain frame of time. For example, in the first mission, you’re tasked with exporting several thousand units of tropical food.
There are other modes of play, including a Challenge mode and a free-do-whatever mode.
I have a lot to learn about being a dictator. I learned what makes a bad one and a good one, but I still can’t walk the line for either. I miss opportunities to make connections with trade partners, I consistently fail at keeping my populace and the various factions happy with me and, well, there’s that whole starvation thing.
During my play I did notice a few, let’s say, bad things. First and foremost: this isn’t a friendly game. I had to restart the tutorial several times and still struggled mightily through the first mission. It feeds into the fact that the menus are absolutely loaded with stuff to build, and the game gives terrible direction as to what to do next. There’s no clear-cut path to building a perfect dictatorship, which is nice, but also very frustrating. I’m also not enjoying the fickle road builder and the generally twisted and rock-cluttered nature of most of the islands. They seem much too confined, which kills industry because it takes too long for food and exports to arrive to the people.
Also, it seems like people get restless much too fast, but that might be me being a terrible dictator.
I’ll continue to learn and play and I plan to keep updating all of you on the nuance in the game as I learn. Until then, think happy thoughts. I’m glued to this thing despite my ignorance and sensitivity.
Tropico 3hits the PC in October, and an Xbox 360 version is in the works.
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These images were taken on our Alienware M17x. The game was running at full resolution (1920 x 1200) on the highest settings, so what you see is what we did during our preview.
