Year 2001's favorite builder game of mine, Tropico

[RK47]

I absolutely still love it. I just reinstalled it after I met my classmate for dinner. We talked about some games we used to play back then, Starcraft etc. Then we talked about Tropico. Man, what an awesome builder game. Too bad the sequel sucked.

Even now at work, I can't wait to get home and play it again. I'll post screenie when I can just so you get an idea of the game.

It's an island builder game. Set in some caribbean nation, you can rule with an iron fist or try to give a sense of democracy to your people. oh crap boss is here. Ciaoz.

 

[Jasede]

This game has a fucking awesome soundtrack I can't find anywhere.

 

[Nedrah]

You mean there actually is a game where you can't come up with a link to the soundtrack in under 2 minutes? Heresy!

 

[Jasede]

Oh you know me badly-

http://gamemusichall.net/music/Tropico/tropico.php

Enjoy. It's very, very good!

Hmmm, this isn't the OST- it's the real songs, not the ones used in game.

Hmm, the differences are very subtle.

 

[VonVentrue]

Yes, Tropico is a jewel that never became a classic for some unknown reason.

And as someone has stated already, the game's atmosphere and music are simply brilliant.

 

[Severian Silk]

I only have the sequel. What makes it so much worse?

 

[RK47]

Sequel lacks compelling reason to build.
I mean, yes you're pirates and shit...but theres no naval combat (what I recall) I just send ships out and they come back with booty. There's not much things to do nor any interesting decision to make.

I love tropico cause I can experiment a bit with wages, builds, industries. The replay value is tremendous. I admit I never even played 50% of the scenarios but the random map game is awesome sandbox in itself.

 

[RK47]

I love the traits picking as well and review my victory scores.
Here's some of the early game decision you have to make:
What is your early industry? Farming, Mining, Tourism , Logging?
When will you build residential? If so, what sort ? Cheap, Medium or Luxury?
Which faction do you aim to please most? There are around 8 factions to please with differing needs and priorities.

Mid game:
How much support are you getting? Can you survive an open election?
Is it time to start giving high school education? If so, what sort of jobs will you create for the educated populace?
How much of an income gap are willing to make?
Is your military of enough size to quell uprising?
Is your citizen getting enough medical care & are their food needs taken care of?

Plenty of stuff to think about and toy around with. I once was losing a fair election that I could not cheat on (mess with the votes), faced with desperation I sent my palace guards to snipe down my opposition's strongest supporting. 3 dead people later, the votes swing to my favor. :wink:

 

[spacemoose]

YES this game is kickass, if not as detailed as caesar, I love it simply for the fact that you can order your soldiers to "eliminate" any other citizen.

sometimes I would build a city up just to make it riot in a gigantic melee

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

RK47
Jasede
Jack
zool
Jazz_
vonAchdorf
Hoaxmetal

I bought Tropico 1 and its expansion from Gog. I'm really liking it so far. After doing the tutorial I decided to have a practice run with the game on the easiest random map settings I could make. As you can imagine, everything went pretty well, however, I've hit upon something that's really putting a stumbling block into the otherwise virtually perfect experience...

The school system seems to be refusing to educate people for certain professions & its driving me nuts.

When I was looking through all the buildings the game lets me build I noticed a lot require an education, including my personal bodyguard which was already in requirement. So one of the first buildings I built was a High School. I built a Police Station almost concurrently to accompany it. Maybe before the first 5 years were through. It did an amazing job of teaching girls to be teachers and fairly soon I had a school full of teachers. It trained a couple of Policemen and then just stopped. I have empty slots for my policemen, priests, bodyguards and it does nothing. No-one goes to school. I check it three or four times a year and the school is either empty or it's teaching a couple more women to become teachers. Basically, it refuses to be self-sufficient. I looked up some hints on-line and people just said "it fills up when you have places available for graduates to work at", but for my game this seems to be bollocks. I'll drop from three priests to one and it does nothing, just sits there empty. I drop from 8 policemen to six and it just sits there empty. I build a guard-post, and it just sits there empty.

Later on in the game the Intellectual faction started demanding I build a College. And many of the better buildings, including electricity, require college grads. So I build a college. After importing the usual couple of starter teachers, I sit and wait for the High School to fill up so as to feed my college. But nothing happens, my high school just sits there empty. I have gaps at my clinic, my cathedral, my armoury, the nature reserve, and just nothing happens, year after year. However, as soon as I build the Electric Plant, it fills up... with women. And it perfectly fills up my plant with workers through the education system. Then goes dead again.

I tried changing the educational focus in the school itself. Nothing. I tried the decree for people to learn their ABCs, which filled it up once before it went dead again. It seems to work ok for any positions where the game demands you employ women. But for any position which requires educated men it does nothing, absolutely nothing. I have to import literally all my male educated workers.

Also, and supplemental, from that one-time binge from the ABCs decree, my police station filled up but my church remained virtually empty, so I fired some policemen, expecting them to simply revert to the church, as happened when I fired a college prof and he went immediately to the clinic, but the policemen didn't revert to another educated trade, they just left the police station. I never even looked at their names so I've no idea where they went, but it wasn't to any educated trade as, at that time, I'd already imported people to fill all the other male educated positions.

Do you know of any bug which is effecting males in the education system in this game or if there's something I'm not noticing that will get this production line to actually function? I'm capable of playing around it, but I'd rather the game actually worked because, as it is, it's a big enough rage-generator to make me consider quitting, which I really don't want to do, as the game has so much going for it.

Thanks in advance for any experience or assistance.

This thread on the Gog forum is similar in nature, also with no solutions:

https://af.gog.com/forum/tropico_series/is_there_a_doctor_in_the_house?as=1649904300

 

[Bocian]

I kind of enjoyed Tropico 2 more than 1. Pirate island felt closer to my heart than a socialist shithole.

 

[imajia]

The school system seems to be refusing to educate people for certain professions & its driving me nuts.

• make sure that you have enough unemployed people
• block the slots of the jobs you don't want to get occupied (they show a red x if you do)
• fire random people from their job until they go to school
• pay more money for the jobs you nee

 

[RK47]

The school system seems to be refusing to educate people for certain professions & its driving me nuts.

• make sure that you have enough unemployed people
• block the slots of the jobs you don't want to get occupied (they show a red x if you do)
• fire random people from their job until they go to school
• pay more money for the jobs you nee

yeah you have to micromanage a lot.

Ashery can help you more

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Yeah, so far these are just "maybe you should try this XYZ generic test", I'm not getting the feeling that any replies so far are "oh yeah, I had that problem and this solved it" or "it's a known bug that can happen" or "never happened in my games". I'm happy to experiment with any suggestions, though turning my game into a bug-testing session is rather tedious, haha.

 

[imajia]

Ok, if it helps you: I don't have this problem anymore. My biggest mistake in the beginning was overexpansion which leads to too many jobs. And usually the preassure to move to educated jobs is not that high. So if you have no unemployment and you have a lot of open jobs, then you have to micromanage the workes into the positions you want. If you have enough unemployed people, then it's not unusual that they fill the high school.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I must admit, I've been running mostly full employment, for the huge bonus rep from the commies, but at one point I had quite few unemployed people and I possibly remember one person training to become a priest once, and I guess it might have been in that period. I'll give this idea a shot first. I'll let you know if it works next week (it's currently my weekend game).

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I'll let you know if it works next week (it's currently my weekend game).

I finished the first full game, but only got about 80 points as I was playing on a ridiculously easy map of about 8% difficulty. I started another game on a more 'normal' map with 98% difficulty and have got to about 30 years in that (about 650 points so far) and I have to say, I'm still being regularly frustrated by how the game manages employees and education, but I'm not really noticing the education bug. It's really weird, but I don't see people ever really going to school. Whenever I click on the school it's either empty or there's one or two people in there for the blink of an eye. I even had a situation at one point where someone was designated as a Student but didn't appear in the school's roster of pupils. Its like the school jobs just get filled by magic. I haven't bothered building a college yet, I might just buy the few college people I need for this game and see if I can just avoid all that and still get decent points.

I wish there was some way to mark certain jobs as a priority rather than all this 'fire and hope' system and 'auto move-around' system that's more like a demented retard's method of governing than a dedicated micromanagement'ers. There are some places of employment that get severely more fucked over by people leaving or dying than other places, and it would be great if you could mark some as auto-max and others as left-overs. Have the devs any idea how infuriating it is to slowly and carefully build up a ranch full of cows, only for the game to decide one of the farmers has died/swapped jobs/emigrated, whatthefuckever, and not bother to replace them, resulting in half your herd 'vanishing' purely because the number of your herd relates to the number of employees. Likewise for Hotels. And yet the game will quite happily 'auto-move' a well paid bureaucrat into a lower paid farmer's job if it feels like it.

And none of this is from a lack of micromanagement on my part. I have it set to the slowest speed setting. Every month I check the employment overview, regularly clicking on all the places of work, changing max employees, changing wages, manually checking everything has the right amount of employees, and yet, time and again, it's doing stuff that is just utterly bizzare, unhelpful and just plain irritating. If the game genuinely was primarily a micromanagement game then whoever made it would have made the whole employment thing (a gigantic aspect of the game) actually properly micromanagementable, not some bizarre auto-madness that the player has to 'do battle with'. You know, drop down menus for each worker, telling them where to go to work/school. Check marks at places of work to instruct that employee not to leave that job. Priority designators for the most important places of work similar to the priority meter for building plots.

Oh yeah, and I built a President's Childhood Home' for the first time... and quickly changed it off the Loud Speaker option... and yet the thing still bleats out possibly the most irritating repetitive and obnoxious sound effect in all of gaming history, forcing me to turn of sounds in the options for the rest of this game.

At the moment though, all this is just nitpicks in the grand scheme of things as I'm still really liking the game. I'm still tempted to go for a 960% difficulty map at some point and I'm looking forward to seeing how much of a % is too much of a % . Also loving the music, the building, the animations, the economy, the political simulation and the humour. But, wow, why oh why are so many devs completely incapable of putting micromanagement into their micromanagement games! Some shit is just such a no-brainer!!!!!!...

 

[Borelli]

The "feel" i got about education playing the game last 10 years is that some jobs require people to have certain political inclinations, otherwise they won't work there even if you keep firing them from everything else, for example, high school man without religious + will rather work on a farm than in a church. Since people will educate themselves only when jobs open, this means that you need to have a religious person beforehand if you want him to go to high school for a priest. Parochial education is only for people already in high school so it will not work (although it has other benefits) unless you are willing to micromanage people who come out of high school with religious + around.

Now since lots of tropicans are religious you may think that nature itself shall provide you with enough religious people for churches, but if a person has militaristic ++ and religious + it seems he may go to work as a palace guard instead of a priest. So some micro is necessary.

This makes newspapers one of the most powerful buildings in the game. You may have noticed that at the default 40 or 50 people start you start with one college educated female. This allows you to run newspapers at the very start. Unlike other media buildings which mostly increase respect for a certain faction, newspaper increases respect AND number of people in that faction.
This allows you a measure of control of your people. Otherwise set it to coupons and get cash. This is one thing i love about Tropico 1, the variety of build orders you have at beginning.

Aside from churches and cathedrals requiring religious people obviously, i have noticed that banks seem to attract capitalists (not a problem unless you build more than 1 bank, since capitalists are more rare than other faction), and military buildings require militarists.

 

[Ashery]

Enabling the 'Social Security' civic might also help when it comes to education. Education itself is free, but it also pays nothing and the only housing option your citizens likely have that's free is a shack.

Imajia mostly covered the rest of my advice.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Dude, I stopped playing this game ages ago... It appears to be another one of those games where the main frustration is watching little sprites wander around doing fuck all with no means to micromanage them other than unintended attempts at workarounds that might or might not work, your movement might vary kind of nonsense. It's quite fun, but lacks replayability because although there are lots of buildings, most of them are fairly pointless, even in a 50 year game.

 

[Ashery]

...Your posts are 2-3 weeks old, I got tagged, and you're telling me it's an old post? :p

Eh, I wouldn't be quite so hard re:most buildings being useless. When it comes to housing, sure (Spam apartment complexes with Russian aid), but the rest is all largely useful.

That said, I agree that the game has some fundamental flaws that make it difficult to enjoy long term. In my case, it's the fact that citizens reserve slots in a service building from the moment they decide to go there...even if they're literally walking across an entire island to get there. This results in a death spiral. A service on one half of the island would be full, so someone nearby would decide to go to the next nearest, even if it's all the way across the island. This artificially limits capacity on the service on that side of the island, which then makes it more likely that someone from that side reserve a slot, once again, on the opposite side of the island. It's a real ugly feedback loop. On top of that, by the time the person gets back from the other side of the island, it's been so long that their other service demands need to be met.

I first really noticed that in depth when I realized my banks, all four of which were assigned to laundering money to my Swiss bank account, barely moved more than a few thousand dollars a year. Banks, unlike, say, power plant workers, only operate when their workers are present, and they were spending so much time getting basic services that they'd virtually never work.

 

[imajia]

Yeah, that can get quite annoying. Distributing the building helps a bit. Here is an example with 670 residents, easy settings:

Spoiler

Each circle basically marks a village where most services are within reasonable reach. It's not perfect, but it works OK by Tropico standards. Which means there are still years where some industries produce fuck all.

 

[Ashery]

For sure, but it's not a situation that's easy to get out of once you realize what's happening. Especially if you're in the late game and don't really have real estate near your heavily developed cores.

 

[Master]

I wish there was some way to mark certain jobs as a priority rather than all this 'fire and hope' system and 'auto move-around' system that's more like a demented retard's method of governing than a dedicated micromanagement'ers. There are some places of employment that get severely more fucked over by people leaving or dying than other places, and it would be great if you could mark some as auto-max and others as left-overs. Have the devs any idea how infuriating it is to slowly and carefully build up a ranch full of cows, only for the game to decide one of the farmers has died/swapped jobs/emigrated, whatthefuckever, and not bother to replace them, resulting in half your herd 'vanishing' purely because the number of your herd relates to the number of employees. Likewise for Hotels. And yet the game will quite happily 'auto-move' a well paid bureaucrat into a lower paid farmer's job if it feels like it.

And none of this is from a lack of micromanagement on my part. I have it set to the slowest speed setting. Every month I check the employment overview, regularly clicking on all the places of work, changing max employees, changing wages, manually checking everything has the right amount of employees, and yet, time and again, it's doing stuff that is just utterly bizzare, unhelpful and just plain irritating. If the game genuinely was primarily a micromanagement game then whoever made it would have made the whole employment thing (a gigantic aspect of the game) actually properly micromanagementable, not some bizarre auto-madness that the player has to 'do battle with'. You know, drop down menus for each worker, telling them where to go to work/school. Check marks at places of work to instruct that employee not to leave that job. Priority designators for the most important places of work similar to the priority meter for building plots.

At the moment though, all this is just nitpicks in the grand scheme of things as I'm still really liking the game. I'm still tempted to go for a 960% difficulty map at some point and I'm looking forward to seeing how much of a % is too much of a % . Also loving the music, the building, the animations, the economy, the political simulation and the humour. But, wow, why oh why are so many devs completely incapable of putting micromanagement into their micromanagement games! Some shit is just such a no-brainer!!!!!!...

Dude, I stopped playing this game ages ago... It appears to be another one of those games where the main frustration is watching little sprites wander around doing fuck all with no means to micromanage them other than unintended attempts at workarounds that might or might not work, your movement might vary kind of nonsense. It's quite fun, but lacks replayability because although there are lots of buildings, most of them are fairly pointless, even in a 50 year game.

You shouldn't play it like that. It's not really a micromanagement type of game. The lack of precise orders isn't an oversight, it's intended. Whole point is that you don't have total information and control and have to do some guesswork. Adding micromanaging would be like adding an I win button and would kill the game.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Complete bollocks. The game has loads of micromanagement, is easy to 'win' anyway & citation needed.