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Tropico 5 
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Minor Diety
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Post Tropico 5
So I bought this in the Steam sale and played it quite a bit lately...as you may or may not know I very much enjoy the Tropico games, for their mix of city building, resource management, dictatorial aspirations and of course their extreme silliness. But I also know that they are a bit of a cash cow for their makers so I'm not gonna blow 50 euro on one of the games at release and then spend another 2-5 euro per piece of DLC. Not to mention they are doing the same thing as Bethesda and keep the price of the DLC high but then release a cheap GOTY addition with the base game and all the DLC...which you then don't want to buy because you often already own the base game if you were a fan and don't want to pay twice for it. Ugh.

So unlike with Skyrim, I was smart and waited. And it was worth it. :) For well under 10 euros I got several hours' worth of great fun. I love building cities and systems already, so when it's coupled to a nice atmosphere, good music and funny scenarios I'm sold. I finished the main campaign already which was mostly the same old as in Tropico 3 and 4, with one major change: the dynasty system.

Basically the main changes to the campaign are twofold:

- You don't just have 'one' Presidente, you can build a dynasty of up to 6 family members with their own weakness and abilities. You can exchange one for the other during one game with the elections - if you win them, of course. :roll: Which can come in handy, as in some scenarios a character with a military background can be much better than, say, an environmentalist. Or vice versa.

- The game campaign moves along in history and slowly progresses you from the colonial times up to modern times. This means changing industries, loyalties, needs, foreign partners, technologies an so forth. This also means that you don't switch islands all the time. You play on only a handful of islands and "continue" with the stuff you've built there before. Which is pretty neat! So if you plan well you can make things much easier for yourself by having a well working economy and good infrastructure at the start of your later missions. Alternatively, you can really fuck yourself if you're focusing too much on one (or the wrong) industry. Raw product exports are great in colonial times, but if your entire economy is based around it and some of your mines and oil deposits are depleted around the Cold War era you can create some serious problems for yourself. So, as with anything, diversification and renewable resources (ie plants) should be a good basis of your economy.

I feel like the developers probably put the "play on the same islands several times" in there because people didn't like having to say goodbye to the islands they'd spent so much time creating at the end of every mission. I have to admit, it created some problems for me at first since I didn't realize this was how it would work so I spent the beginning of the game doing short term work to just win a mission, not caring about the long term consequences. But once I got the hang of it I was raking in cash at an insane tempo, with approval ratings of 85%. I didn't even had to suspend elections and declare martial law anymore. :lol:

Because seriously, these Tropicans are ingrates. You tell them to stick with you for a few years as you lay the foundations of a paradise on earth, but those fuckers would vote you out and rebel instead. Sure, I only gave you cheap (decent) housing, early retirement, a decent wage, social security and free elections. I didn't even bother to install a secret police in most cases, and rarely (if ever) actively pocketed money into my Swiss bank account. At least I was smart enough to create a professional army and pay it well, to avoid coups and rebel takeovers during the planning phases.

So yeah, TL;DR, Tropico 5 is still an amazingly fun game if you like the genre. It's not perfect, and don't expect too much new stuff compared to Tropico 4, but eh. I could play this game forever, really, if they keep the gameplay and have more silly and unique scenarios.

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Tue Jul 05, 2016 3:17 am
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Felix Rex
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Post Re: Tropico 5
Sounds cool. I can't say the genre is my favorite, but occasionally I have a strong hankering for some city building and planning. Being able to oppress the citizenry is an added bonus. I may keep an eye out for a future sale.

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Wed Jul 06, 2016 7:35 am
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Post Re: Tropico 5
This game does sound good and is right up my street. I think the only thing deterring me is the relatively small city sizes. Or at least from what i've seen in screenshots.

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Mon Jul 11, 2016 3:27 am
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Post Re: Tropico 5
The population size depends on the era you are playing in, and how you want to run your nation. And of course the amount of jobs. You're not gonna get 50 immigrants on every boat if you don't have any jobs open. Stuff like free healtcare and food will also attract more of them.

The game provides you with some basic tools to curb or increase the immigration flow, but it's not much. Basically it's a choice between open doors (all sorts of immigrants welcome), visa system (more educated immigrants, less on the whole), or tight border control (almost no immigrants, only high educated ones/invited workers). In the previous tropico games you had more and better options imo. http://tropico.wikia.com/wiki/Immigrati ... co_3_and_4) You could literally turn the island in a nightmare where you can't leave (or enter, without an invation). So basically North Korea. :P You can also do shit like ban the use of birth control to cause a population boom, if you want to be that guy.

The population cap is 2000 or something close to that I believe. I've gotten to 1000-1500 without playing sandbox. So yeah, you're not building MASSIVE cities, but they are difficult enough to control as it is. Your population has different levels of education so can't all work the same jobs, for example, so having a massive illiterate population is usually not the best way to set up a strong economy. It IS possible, if you want to go full agriculture, raw resources and tourism I suppose.

I'm not sure Derf would like the game enough, since it's a bit too vague/wishy washy for him. The mechanics are not bad, but they are still a bit arcane. I think you would love Dwarf Fortress a lot more if you had the time to get past the ridiculous interface. A recent update to DF:

http://www.pcgamer.com/how-cats-get-dru ... ravel-yet/

Quote:
"It's just a hard problem" is probably the understatement of the year. Adams gave me another great story: an explanation of why cats started getting drunk and puking in the latest version of Dwarf Fortress.

"I added taverns to fortress mode, so the dwarves will go to a proper establishment, get mugs, and make orders, and they’ll drink in the mug," Adams said. "And, you know, things happen, mugs get spilled, there’s some alcohol on the ground.

"Now, the cats would walk into the taverns, right, and because of the old blood footprint code from, like, eight years ago or something, they would get alcohol on their feet. It was originally so people could pad blood around, but now any liquid, right, so they get alcohol on their feet. And then I wanted to add cleaning stuff so when people were bathing, or I even made eyelids work for no reason, because I do random things sometimes. So cats will lick and clean themselves, and on a lark, when I made them clean themselves I’m like, ‘Well, it’s a cat. When you do lick cleaning, you actually ingest the thing that you’re cleaning off, right? They make hairballs, so they must swallow something, right?' And so the cats, when they cleaned the alcohol off their feet, they all got drunk. Because they were drinking.

But the numbers were off on that. I had never thought about, you know, activating inebriation syndromes back when I was adding the cleaning stuff. I was just like, ‘Well, they ingest it and they get a full dose,’ but a full dose is a whole mug of alcohol for a cat-sized creature, and it does all the blood alcohol size-based calculations, so the cats would get sick and vomit all over the tavern."

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Tue Jul 12, 2016 7:12 am
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Post Re: Tropico 5
Should probably mention I beat the main campaign and all of the DLC missions by now.

The main campaign was great - challenging yet doable. The DLC missions varied from horrible to very nice. When I say horrible, I mean the kind of game design that goes "well, you couldn't have known this, but now that you reached milestone A there will be a massive military invasion that you could never have anticipated. Hah!" So basically the only way to win these scenarios was to a) plan for everything or b) reload a few months and build the appropriate infrastructure. Which, obviously, is retarded and lazy game design. I would have hated all of the DLC missions if it weren't for some of them that were actually good and avoided this, so overall, lukewarm feelings.

One thing I have learned though is to mix in some state surveillance with my progressive and egalitarian policies. There will always be malcontents. At least now I have a drone HQ to take out those who disagree with my rule. It's cool, I already had an approval rate of 75%, so no one will miss the whiners who don't like El Presidente's measures. 8-)

The only thing left now is to play the mini campaigns that came with the GOTY package. Once I have a working PC again. :roll:

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Fri Jul 29, 2016 4:08 pm
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