Originally published on Gamers.com
Have you ever wanted to rule starving, naked, illiterate peasants with an iron fist? Tropico makes all that possible; the moral fallout is entirely up to you.
As the dictatorial ruler of a small island, you build the infrastructure and pass the laws to establish the kind of banana republic you want to run. Will you exploit natives to serve tourists? Or run a complex export economy? Tropico takes the urban planning aspects of SimCity and weds them to the wild Cold War politics of the Caribbean and Central America simulated by games like Hidden Agenda.
Tropico, a study in colonialism, was created by ten "middle of the road white guys," according to David Deen, an artist on the project working out of the PopTop software offices in St. Louis. The game sprung from the same fertile imaginations behind Railroad Tycoon 2, and it shares the same game engine.
The game's opening animation sequence shows a lively but seedy street scene from a 1960s Caribbean town. Peasant mother and child trip through the gutter. Fat bikinied tourists wander unawares. Military men take bribes. Guerillas steal military supplies. It's an interdependent world of questionable principles.
You can play through PopTop's scenarios, or play a freeform game. There's no multiplayer. You start a freeform game by configuring an island, choosing the size, vegetation level, available mineral resources and population. You choose the way you want to win from a list of victory conditions -- build and sustain a large population, funnel millions into a Swiss bank account, make your people happy, or simply enjoy a long career.
Play an Ugly Neurotic Flatulent Communist
Next you create yourself a male or female dictator. You choose a background for him or her; did he go to Harvard? Did he rise to power in a military coup? Is he an alcoholic or a womanizer (or is she a "manizer" for that matter)? Does he fart a lot? Does he have terrible breath? Maybe he's a consummate charmer, or he's deeply religious. The game forces you to choose from useful characteristics and character liabilities, making for well-rounded and memorable characters. "I am an ugly paranoid scholar raised in the United States," sounds a lot more interesting than "I have a charisma of 16 and a wisdom of 18."
Some of these characteristics are whimsical, but they affect the way different groups in the game will treat you. If you're an avowed capitalist, expect closer relations with the US. If you're a noted ladies man, the church might not receive your calls. If you smell bad and you stutter, your people may not take your laws and edicts to heart, since much of your leadership will depend on your powers of persuasion. Well, that and your military might.
Railroad Engine
Since the game is built on the Railroad Tycoon 2 engine, players can scale the resolution from either 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 all the way up to 1600 x 1200. When we saw the game, it still used the railroad spike pointer from RRT2. There's still much development ahead before Tropico is published. PopTop is shooting for March 2001 for a PC release, with a Macintosh release scheduled shortly after that. A Dreamcast version has been announced but remains unscheduled.
PopTop is still play-balancing the game speed. In Tropico, time passes without noticeable days or nights or weekends. Months and years are the important units of measurement. Right now, the average game might last from 10-70 years; a short game on high speed could be played in under an hour.
The camera views are typical of city building/management sims. You see a three-quarters view of the landscape, and you can click around on the buildings and the people. You'll start out with a simple presidential palace (you can make it more opulent later), a construction office, a teamster's office (they move stuff), docks, farms, and shanties. Tropico may be the only sim where you start off with shantytowns before you even get a chance to run things poorly. The people will put up their own rundown clapboard housing unless you provide something better.
Poverty Has a Face and a Name
You'll soon see your citizens wandering the map; farmers in wide brimmed hats, fat bankers, even fatter tourists, cigar smoking generals in green suits, elderly peasant ladies with walkers. Each of these folks has a unique identity. You can't control them, but you can click on them to see where they work, where they live, and who else in the game is in their family. There's a bit of Rollercoaster Tycoon here; you need to track people's moods and thoughts to plan the next building. Does Miguel complain that there's not enough religion in your very own little Babylon? Slap up a church along his walk to work; strolling near a house of God will revive his ambient faith.
There's a little bit of the Sims, too - people have individual needs like hunger and happiness and healthy environments. Keeping track of these will let you know when your actions stray too far from the concerns of your countrymen. In the information window for each citizen, there's a graph -- the x-axis is the spectrum of capitalist to communist and the y-axis is the spectrum from religious to militaristic. You can see your own position and how it relates to each citizen you view.
Edicted
As a leader, you can issue proclamations, or "edicts." They're a bit like spells -- they have a cost and can affect the people directly, or change the rules governing life on your island.
You can target an individual if they are too divergent to stay a citizen of your banana republic. Bribery might be the kindest punishment - other options include drafting them, arresting them, deporting them, declaring them a heretic, and "eliminating" them. Eliminating them in broad daylight is dangerous, so you might wait until they've wandered off towards a far distant workplace. But beware, if there's anyone employed as a journalist walking nearby, they'll take a picture and share it with the world. Also, each person you punish has a family who could become very unhappy. If enough people become incensed and you can't please them or kill them in time, they'll escape to the forest to live underground as rebels. You'll begin to see red beret guerillas attacking your citizens and plotting your demise.
Other edicts affect society in broader terms. If you're lacking citizens, you can partner with the church and announce a ban on contraception. Or if the people are getting too smart and too uppity, you could host a book burning. Each edict might please one group and alienate another (for example, burning books might suit the church and anger intellectuals).
David Deen from PopTop provided this current list of edicts you can enforce in Tropico:
Cast on individuals: draft, bribe, brand heretic, arrest, deport, and eliminate.
Cast on a location: patrol, investigate, and prospect. (the first two obviously are carried out by the military)
General policy: host international summit, bust the unions, and announce air pollution standards.
US and/or USSR: denounce, form economic pact, praise, share technology with, and form military alliance.
Tourism: run national tourism ad campaign, host Mardi Gras celebration, and host Olympics.
Government stances: hold election, form people's army, declare martial law.
Religion: hold inquisition, have book-burning, request papal visit
Miscellaneous: contraception ban, literature program, sensitivity training, prohibition.
There will likely be more edicts for you to wield by the time the game is finished.
No Drugs; Sex.
What would laws be without lucre? Your starting pool of cash is soon spent on buildings, and wages. You can levy taxes to bring that money back into your coffers, but you will need to bring in new money from the rest of the world to support growth and expansion.
There are two ways to do this -- exports and tourism. In an export economy, you can sell farm goods, lumber, or minerals, or you can build factories to refine these materials into more finished products. Besides furniture and jewelry, you'll find many exciting vice products of the Caribbean represented, including rum and cigars. Regardless of requests from seedy game journalists, there's no drug production in Tropico (maybe in the "Tropicoca" expansion pack).
Tourists present a potentially lucrative source of cash, plus they're fun to watch. They spend their money at archaeological sites, nightclubs, cantinas, souvenir shops, casinos, and "cabarets" (the women coming out of the cabarets wear stretch pants and leopard print, if that's any indication of what kind of song and dance the designers had in mind). Tourists can be good business, but they don't want to see noxious mining shafts and shacks. And some don't want to party with the natives. So you can establish a dress code to bar your own people from entering these tourist hotspots.
A third source of income exists: you can request a limited amount of funds from the US or USSR, and they might provide it if you are willing to legislate some capitalist or communist reforms.
Politico Tropico
If the politics of Tropico sound troubling, you probably would have found early Cold War Cuba disturbing, too. No Cubans, Dominicans or Haitians worked on the game, so we're missing their perspectives. Instead, the designers immersed themselves in the history and literature of Cuba during the 1950s to 1970s. They emerged with a Cold War colonial laboratory; a historically twisted simulation for people who enjoy their SimCity with a political kink.
by Justin Hall
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