Ruts and Rebuttals

Almost nine yards

One thing I don't understand about Tropico is the placement of buildings in relation to roads. Roads in Tropico are optional. Most sim games require you to put roads down before people will go to a building. In Tropico your people don't mind walking through fields or forests. The manual does say that roads will encourage people to walk farther and over hills, it doesn't say by how much. There were a few times that I couldn't get people to work at a building, but that problem is easily solved by building housing nearby. This isn't a big problem, but it does demonstrate a general problem in Tropico of not showing you any examples of how things work.

Jewelry factory

Cathedral de Tropico

The tutorial in Tropico is horrible. I wouldn't even bother going through it. It only lasts about 10 minutes, and it doesn't take you through any of the industry, politics or tourism. It spends more time teaching you how to zoom and rotate than it does teaching you how to play the game. Tutorials in Sim games should be designed to show you how buildings/people work in real situations. While the instruction manual tells you what buildings do, there's a big difference between knowing what something is supposed to do and actually using it. It's like reading about driving a car and actually doing it.

Nightclub

Immigration office

Throw me a bone!

Tropico's manual is fun to read but lacks also lacks examples. There are short bios on famous 20th century dictators. Some of them you've probably never heard of (Jean Bedel Bokassa of Central Africa) and others are still household names (Fidel Castro). I appreciate it when games teach you somthing. Hell most of the world history I know comes from playing Civilization (no offense to my high school World Civ. Teacher Mr. Throckmorton). Besides the dictator bios, the manual explains everything in the game, from the political factions to the dozens of dictator attributes. There are several glaring errors in the manual; misplaced text and pictures mostly. Like the tutorials the manual explains what things do, but it doesn't give any example of how to use them in the game.

Fat tourists wallowing on the beach

Sight-seeing

One thing I have to knock Tropico on is the definite lack of a drug-based economy! This may be because I saw Blow recently, but I think Tropico could have been that much cooler if you could run your economy on coca plants or maybe a little hemp. Imagine, you could get your Pablo Escobar on and run 80% of your economy off of fat Hollywood and rock stars. Ah well, it probably would have taught the kids the wrong idea about drug trafficking.