It's Tropico 4, El Presidente!

captaink

Welcome back, El Presidente, to beautiful Tropico!



http://www.worldoftropico.com/us/index.php
Here are some new features:

Key Features:

New campaign – Face 20 new challenging missions across 10 entirely new maps
Build Your Vision of Island Perfection – Not only are the graphics enhanced, but 20 new buildings including the stock exchange, shopping mall, aqua park and a mausoleum for El Presidente allow you to craft your perfect balance of beauty and economic efficiency
State of Emergency – Six new interactive disasters including volcanoes, droughts and tornadoes prove that Mother Nature can be a tougher adversaries than opponents bent on your political ouster
Council of Ministers – Appoint selected citizens to ministerial posts to help push through and enact your more controversial decisions and edicts
National Agenda – Receive objectives from Tropican factions, foreign geopolitical powers or opportunities relating to current island events that can further or hamper your dictatorial ambitions
Facebook and Twitter integration – Post live Tweets directly from the game or create posts automatically upon completion of missions, unlocking achievements, etc. Store and display achievements and screenshots of your ultimate island empire on facebook and compare your Dictator Rankings against others online (Windows PC only feature)

And there's a demo here:
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/08/09/tropico-4-demo-welcomes-you-back-el-presidente/#continued


Tropico 3 was one of my favorite games in recent years, so I have high hopes for the sequel. If you haven't played it, it goes on sale all the time on Steam and other DD sites. If you like Simcity, Caesar, or any of those other types of city-building games, you'll like it. It's pretty and bright and charming and, at least for me, just the right amount of challenge.

Coming to PC, and for the first time, Xbox 360 on August 30.

Here's a video too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps6QEhI_7jc

Synthesis

I've got both the third game and the expansion, and I picked up the first game when it was first published. While the addition of a cabinet (finally) is a welcome feature, the new buildings and edicts seem to be expected really, the graphical revision is obviously quite small (compared to the huge leap between the third game and the second and first one).

I may be alone, but what I think the game really needs is 1) an expansion of scale and 2) serious revisions of infrastructure. Sure, as far as Carribean island simulators go, this is much less Cuba and much more Haiti, but I think we're overdue for things like freight and passenger trains, water infrastructure, more complex electricity, and even (on the very high end) things like internet and television. The addition of the garage and expanded roads was a needed step in the game, but they need to go further. I suppose they still could, through expansion.

Well, time to try the demo.

captaink

I dunno, part of the attraction to me for Tropico is its relative simplicity. A lot of those things sound very complex. Maybe in an expansion, you might be right. 4 does look more like an iteration, rather than a revolution. But I'm mostly fine with that.

Synthesis

captaink wrote:

I dunno, part of the attraction to me for Tropico is its relative simplicity. A lot of those things sound very complex. Maybe in an expansion, you might be right. 4 does look more like an iteration, rather than a revolution. But I'm mostly fine with that.

The option for complexity should exist--if you want to keep your country as four apartment blocks, a rum factory, and a dozen farms and cottages, nothing's stopping you. The game isn't going to replicate anything on a remotely realistic scale (Cuba's population, for example, is 11 million people, even Jamaica's is almost 3 million), but they really need to move beyond five hundred people being a metropolis. That, of course, goes hand-in-hand with time scale: being able to track any given Tropican's day from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night is nice, but I'm more interested in a vigorous expansion of scale.

If you want your island to have 40 people on it, that's fine. I don't think those of us who want to chase complex, vaguely believable infrastructure and a few thousand residents, and have computers that can handle it, shouldn't necesarily be penalized. Then again, this is going to be multiplatform too, right, and I never played it on the Xbox 360 or PS3. Maybe there are hardware limitations.

At the very least, bring back the ability to have individual cities. Tropico being less of an island nation and more of a city state that happens to exist on an island isn't fitting, I'd say.

captaink

I don't know, that sounds like a game that isn't Tropico to me. It was never about a realistic scale. It's about salsa music and Juanito and crazy edicts.

Archonex

I wish this game had a decent military and combat system. Tropico 3 teased itself having one, what with a few screens of what looked like a revolution in process (With barricades set up in the streets, and such.). But in the end, it was very static and boring, nevermind not very well planned out in how to handle them.

That's what I always liked about Tropico 2. Even if your pirate colony earned the ire of a major country, you could still fight them off. It was really damned tough to do so, but if you had an honest to god, fortress, on the level of Tortuga in fiction, you could do it. And you felt like a total badass afterwards. In Tropico 1, and 3, though? Piss off the US or Russia and it's an instant game over.

It'd be nice to be able to resist invasions. Especially when you hit the point of being what's essentially a modernized nation, late-game. By that point you probably have a military that could stand a glimmer of a chance against a cold war era super-power invading. It's a bit disheartening to be forced to play the politics game, when you have no actual gameplay reason too aside from a game over.

Synthesis

captaink wrote:

I don't know, that sounds like a game that isn't Tropico to me. It was never about a realistic scale. It's about salsa music and Juanito and crazy edicts.

No, it's about being el Presidente, ruling, and the pursuit of power. Which is far greater when you're ruling over a few thousand people than a few hundred.

That's what Tropico needs to fullfill, I'd say. If you want to be a small-time Presidente, nothing's stopping you. I want to rule something substantial, not something the size of a small college campus, and the challenges and rewards that comes with.

Improved attention to military affairs would also help, as Archonex said--we don't need a RTS, but we need a wider variety of military operations and the like, and military infrastructure alongside civil. They went the right direction with offering the ability to make your own nuclear program as a way to guarantee not being invaded by either nation--but imagine if they'd actually programmed a decent run-up to finishing your "nukular program" on Tropico, complete with the reprocussions it carries.

TychoCelchuuu

Tropico is one of my favorite games, Tropico 2 had wonderful music and a great setting but sucked, Tropico 3 looked like Tropico 1 in 3D so I skipped it. Tropico 4 is rubbing me the wrong way because the graphic style just looks really bad. The colors just seem too garish and mismatching and everything. It seems like the graphics have been getting worse every time a new Tropico game comes out. I'm not a graphics whore or anything, but part of what made Tropico so wonderful was all the character your island had, with all the dingy shacks and stuff. Tropico 2's cats that wandered around were awesome. Since then it seems like they've put all their effort into recreating Tropico 1 in 3d without realizing that the style doesn't work quite as well, or something. It just takes me out of the game.

I'll try the demo out, though, if just to hear the music. The Tropico music was so fucking good. I bought that soundtrack CD!

Endaro

I'm a big fan of number 3, bought it not too long ago on steam. Finished all of the base campaign quite easily and am working through the expansion now. My only complaint about Tropico 4 is that it looks more like another expansion than an actual sequel. Looking at the screenshot at the top, I recognize every single building except for the shopping mall in the back right.

If I looked at it without context, I would assume it was just a screenshot of number 3, with an oddly designed city might I add! A tourist skyscraper in the middle of town? Madness.

President Rex

TychoCelchuuu wrote:

Tropico is one of my favorite games, Tropico 2 had wonderful music and a great setting but sucked, Tropico 3 looked like Tropico 1 in 3D so I skipped it. Tropico 4 is rubbing me the wrong way because the graphic style just looks really bad. The colors just seem too garish and mismatching and everything. It seems like the graphics have been getting worse every time a new Tropico game comes out. I'm not a graphics whore or anything, but part of what made Tropico so wonderful was all the character your island had, with all the dingy shacks and stuff. Tropico 2's cats that wandered around were awesome. Since then it seems like they've put all their effort into recreating Tropico 1 in 3d without realizing that the style doesn't work quite as well, or something. It just takes me out of the game.

I'll try the demo out, though, if just to hear the music. The Tropico music was so fucking good. I bought that soundtrack CD!

Eh, 3 is basically 1 except you can build roads (although from the 50s to the 70s/80s they should really stay dirt or gravel roads). Even the buildings stay the same for the most part.


My problem with Tropico is that the military system makes it a game of roulette if you want to play as a dictator. Generals and soldiers may - on a whim - decide to change jobs and suddenly your military is 1/10 smaller. Maybe a new factory opens up and - even though they get paid twice as much - half your palace guards decide they want to make rum 14 hours per day rather than stand in a guard box for 12 hours per day. Plus when the partisans do attack the game is effectively rolling dice, and you have no control over how well your soldiers do (although Tropico 3 did have some stuff that supposedly made them better at combat). A game over can be one coup away and you effectively have no control over your military (hell, one of the bigger problems is when you get 1 rebel who manages to kill all 6-7 of your military; well that's great, one guy overthrew the entire government and killed the entire military...).

Where's my forced conscription, "once a soldier, always a soldier" edict? Or a "Anit-Partisan Training" edict/course for them? If they put in enough countrol it would be a viable game mechanic to have the USA or Russia send a commando squad to assassinate you and legitimately giving your crack military a chance at intercepting them.


Also: twitter/facebook integration is not a feature. No one wants their message feed cluttered up with crap like "Richard just assassinate his first islander in Tropic 4™!"

captaink

You can keep your soldiers at their jobs pretty easily. Make sure they have 1)Higher wages and 2)Higher job satisfaction. I think distance from home to work matters some too. Each Tropcian does a calculation with those factors when they determine what jobs they want. Higher wages usually trumps satisfaction but not always.

I never minded when a few dropped off guard duty to go work in a factory though. Most of the vanilla scenarios didn't have any combat unless you were doing really badly. The expansion scenarios it was sometimes more of a problem, they'd script in some rebels to fight no matter how happy people were.

As for making them better, the Military Modernization edict helped a lot. Job experience didn't seem to matter much, which was disappointing.

Synthesis

Well, the demo was fun, and as expected, the cabinet was a much-appreciated touch. Otherwise, as of now, it doesn't feel like that big a step up from the third game+expansion. I may wait for the expansion this time around.

valhalla130

I can't figure out how to make people happy in Tropico 3.

SyphonBlue

Man the UI is so much better than 3's.

captaink

valhalla130 wrote:

I can't figure out how to make people happy in Tropico 3.

Housing, housing, housing. People hate living in shacks most of all.

After that, food, religion, medicine, and entertainment.

GuildNavigator

As long as they fix the builders, I'll happily buy this game. Tropico 3 was a great game and the expansion was enjoyable, but the builder AI drove me (and a great many other people) absolutely insane.

You could have 2 full construction yards and you'd be lucky if you could build anything in the late game. Workers would show up at work, drive to the site, put in 1-2 nails, then clock out.

The problem was related to satisfaction, only in the completely wrong way. If you provided your people with absolutely nothing, your construction workers would build all day long. The more opportunities you built for them to do other things (churches, theaters, etc) the more they'd spend doing that instead of building.

I really hope they fix that shit.

captaink

The demo for 4 had a 'finish now' button that was really expensive, but I guess it finished that project immediately without builders. I didn't use it to try it out.

The demo really does feel like another expansion for Tropico 3. Spiffed up inventory, but the majority is exactly the same. I like the improvements, but I'm not sure this merits being called a new game instead of an expansion.

Synthesis

I ended up having four or five later game (then again, I really liked building stuff), and firing people if I wasn't building anything. But yeah, that kind of falls to the whole need to have organized infrastructure/better towns.

SyphonBlue

GuildNavigator wrote:

As long as they fix the builders, I'll happily buy this game. Tropico 3 was a great game and the expansion was enjoyable, but the builder AI drove me (and a great many other people) absolutely insane.

You might want to sit down for this part

Basil

valhalla130 wrote:

I can't figure out how to make people happy in Tropico 3.

The people want more statues of El Presidente.

Demiurge

I really don't see whats supposed to be improved about this. I played the demo and apart from a new mission system this is still Tropico 3.

President Rex

captaink wrote:

You can keep your soldiers at their jobs pretty easily. Make sure they have 1)Higher wages and 2)Higher job satisfaction. I think distance from home to work matters some too. Each Tropcian does a calculation with those factors when they determine what jobs they want. Higher wages usually trumps satisfaction but not always.

I never minded when a few dropped off guard duty to go work in a factory though. Most of the vanilla scenarios didn't have any combat unless you were doing really badly. The expansion scenarios it was sometimes more of a problem, they'd script in some rebels to fight no matter how happy people were.

As for making them better, the Military Modernization edict helped a lot. Job experience didn't seem to matter much, which was disappointing.

I mean more for freeplay. It's relatively easy to build an island paradise where everyone has free healthcare, good housing and a decent job. But if you try a sandbox game where you try to be an iron-fisted dictator or get a million dollar slushfund (or just a game where you pander solely to militarists) then your army is more important. The addition of weapon manufacturies and oil platforms even hints at your ability to be an underhanded dictator, but the game mechanics don't let you do much with it.

GuildNavigator

SyphonBlue wrote:

GuildNavigator wrote:

As long as they fix the builders, I'll happily buy this game. Tropico 3 was a great game and the expansion was enjoyable, but the builder AI drove me (and a great many other people) absolutely insane.

You might want to sit down for this part

I just checked the demo. Worker AI seems significantly improved. In Tropico 3 it could take YEARS to build 5-10 houses. Now my workers were able to mow through them one after another, even in the later game.

But yeah, this is just Tropico 3. Even the speeches were the exact same. Word for word. They even hired a new voice actor and STILL didn't change any of the words. WTF.

Basil

You question El Presidente's decision?

INeedNoSalt

i am not enamored by the fact that they just reused all of their art and stuff

Halfhand

I never played Tropico 3 but the demo for this is fun.

SyphonBlue

INeedNoSalt wrote:

i am not enamored by the fact that they just reused all of their art and stuff

Yeah this is literally the same game, but with significantly improved lighting and texture resolution. And a better UI. I'll wait for the Steam sale for $10.

TheGerbil

I for one am not surprised a small studio put out a new game in 2 years using the same art and such. It took them quite a while to make tropico 3 in the first place.

GuildNavigator

TheGerbil wrote:

I for one am not surprised a small studio put out a new game in 2 years using the same art and such. It took them quite a while to make tropico 3 in the first place.

Agreed, but this is expansion pack material. And their last expansion pack, Absolute Power, was DLC material.

TheGerbil

Well Absolute power doubled the number of campaign missions at only 20 bucks. Most expansion packs do about that. Heck very few even DOUBLE the number of scenarios you get. So I was happy with it. Tropico 4 is only 40 bucks and has 20 campaigns with new things to them. I won't mind paying full price for it.

gilrain

It's a bit of a shame that it's basically an improved Tropico 3. However, I also almost find myself relieved... because I did want more Tropico 3. If they'd tried to really make a new iteration, they could easily have fucked it up for everyone. I guess that's pretty cynical, and I really do want to see it taken to the next level eventually. For now, I think I'm just glad to have more Tropico.

Honestly, if it's true that the UI is a lot better, and maybe some of the AI issues are ironed out, then I'll be really happy. An expensive expansion and bug patch for my favorite game? Not ideal, but I'll take it.

That's not to say I won't wait for a sale, but that's always true. Steam has ruined me for supporting even my favorite games at release. :P

In the Tropico 4 production office:

Project Lead: Um, guys... wasn't this going to be a full game?
Team: *sigh* It's always all work and no play for El Progammador!
Project Lead: *enacts the 'Casual Fridays' edict*
The Loyalists are pleased, but... oh no! The Intellectual faction is revolting! The game is going to shit!
Project Lead: Balls to it. *enacts the 'Slap A New Coat of Paint On It!' edict*

captaink

By the way Tropico 3 is on sale again on Steam. Only $7 for the Gold Edition.

Foomy

I really wish that Tropico 4 had been a re-make of tropico 2. I like the pirates better than the cuban island thing. but i'll still buy it when it goes on sale sometime, seeing as I love Tropico 3 and could always use a few more campaign missions.

captaink

My problem with Tropico 2 was that you lived or died based on your ships' success. And I just kept having awful luck with either ships coming up empty-handed, or even losing them. There wasn't much you could do to help, really.

MegaPureiboi

I'm a fan of Tropico 3, and the demo had me pleased. It does feel more like Tropico 3 + 1, so I'll wait for a sale to buy it, but I will buy it eventually.
Edit: It was also nice to see that the annoying "Betty Boom" or whatever her name was, is gone, at least from the demo.

Captain Carrot

Objectives are a great addition to sandbox games. They worked great in EU3, and they look good in Tropico 4 as well.

Brian Krakow

I really, really hope that they've made the higher difficulties more challenging. I found it nearly impossible to lose sandbox games in 3 and my favorite part of 1 was just trying to hang on as a brutal dictator on the highest difficulties (until lazy teamsters inevitably disrupted my cigar shipments, causing me to sink deep into debt and thus rendering me unable to control my subjects).

Halfhand

Can someone help me not go into massive debt all the time in the demo

captaink

Don't go build-happy. Unbuilt buildings are wasted money.

Brian Krakow

captaink wrote:

My problem with Tropico 2 was that you lived or died based on your ships' success. And I just kept having awful luck with either ships coming up empty-handed, or even losing them. There wasn't much you could do to help, really.

I'm playing 2 now, and this really is frustrating, because it's a really fun game otherwise IMO. Not quite as good as 1, but still pretty good. I mean, once you find a really rich sea square your ships can usually score a lot of loot (especially if you're using brigantines with the seamanship bonus like I like to). But then you still have the problem of your ships being sunk faster than you can replace them.

I think I'll start a new game and only send my brigs out in pairs.

GuildNavigator

Halfhand wrote:

Can someone help me not go into massive debt all the time in the demo

Cattle ranches. Tons of cattle ranches.