Simulation

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.

Shopping

Military chasing rebels outside a power plant

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.

Fruit!

A simple life

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.

The characters

More characters

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.