I really have to agree with almost everything Tom said in his Early Hours on Tropico. I've been playing it quite a bit since Friday and it basically has all the wonderful qualities and flaws that he mentions.

I gotta say, though... he wrote all THAT on Tropico and didn't once mention the fabulous music? Shame on you, Tom! =)

As I play it more, I'm beginning to notice a little more depth and freedom than I did at first. I thought at first that you just had to keep everyone happy, but that's not necessarily so... you can appease certain factions only if you plan carefully. I haven't tried doing the "religous zealot" thing yet, but I'm curious to. Going off on a tangent like this takes some planning and a good understanding of how the whole system works, though...

If I have any complaints, they are these:

1. The manual doesn't adequately explain some of the complexities that are pretty important to success. You have to figure them out by poking around it the game--maybe too much.

2. No way to rotate buildings. With the importance of flat land, it's a gameplay issue. Even without, it would be nice for aesthetic purposes. This is a memory issue for lower-end machines, sadly (I asked Phil about it).

3. Roads are not CLEARLY useful. I'm starting to discover that they're good for things like leading toursists through the forest to the spa, but they need to be more clearly beneficial to justify that price.

4. Contruction workers take too long to level land. It needs to go three times as fast.

5. The almanac doesn't organize info in a way I find that useful. I use it a lot, but I wish it was all laid out differently. I don't want to know about "housing quality" so much as I want to know how many people live in each building type, for instance.

I don't mean to sound negative about the game--not at all. I totally agree with Tom's overall very positive assesment. It's definitely a winner. I just don't find much use in reiterating all the good things he already wrote. =)

"I gotta say, though... he wrote all THAT on Tropico and didn't once mention the fabulous music? Shame on you, Tom! =)"

Mea culpa. I have a mention in my notes, but there was no convenient place to stick it into the finished article. To those who've played RRT2, it should speak volumes to say the music in Tropico is every bit as good as the music in RRT2.

"1. The manual doesn't adequately explain some of the complexities that are pretty important to success. You have to figure them out by poking around it the game--maybe too much."

I haven't minded so much. I do have a page or so of questions, but the manual and the especially the tips at the bottom of the screen have been pretty thorough (each line in the almanac has a pretty comprehensive explanation which helps explain a lot of the game's mechanics). Learning the system has been more a matter of discovery than frustration. Tropico requires some trial and error, but not in the same way as a poorly documented game like, say, Space Empires IV, the new poster boy for games sabotaged by crappy manualing.

"2. No way to rotate buildings. With the importance of flat land, it's a gameplay issue. Even without, it would be nice for aesthetic purposes. This is a memory issue for lower-end machines, sadly (I asked Phil about it)."

This is weird to me. The artwork for all four sides of a building is already present when you rotate the map, right? So why would this prohibit rotating buildings before you place them?

"3. Roads are not CLEARLY useful. I'm starting to discover that they're good for things like leading toursists through the forest to the spa, but they need to be more clearly beneficial to justify that price."

I've tried watching teamsters on roads vs. teamsters on dirt and I can't really see a speed difference. Maybe they wander less, like the tourists. I can't tell.

"4. Contruction workers take too long to level land. It needs to go three times as fast."

Actually, I like how this works. Flat land is important, so watch that elevation setting when you set up your island!

However, I do wish I could get some feedback when I place a building. A school overlay put on a 30 degree slope is just as green as a school overlay put on a flat surface, but it might take ten times as long to build.

"5. The almanac doesn't organize info in a way I find that useful. I use it a lot, but I wish it was all laid out differently. I don't want to know about "housing quality" so much as I want to know how many people live in each building type, for instance."

The almanac is a powerful tool. I wish it were a bit more refined. The more I play, the easier it gets, though. But I'm still baffled as to why the damn thing comes on screen with the cover closed...

-Tom

I also would prefer some sort of time indication for land levelling before you place your buildings. I know the engine is capable of that sort of thing, because RRT2 did it for laying rail (with money, at least).

>This is weird to me. The artwork for all four sides of a building is already present when you rotate the map, right? So why would this prohibit rotating buildings before you place them?

Because if you have five apartment buildings, it only shows the one side of all of them. When you rotate the map, it can flush that view out of memory and load in another if you've got a 32 or 64MB machine.

But if you have five apartment buildings with four different orientations, it has to keep the art for all four views loaded at the same time.

It's all doable on machines with lots of RAM, but it's the kind of feature that you could hardly enable just for high-ram people and make low-ram people suffer dealing with the placement of oblong buildings.

>Maybe they wander less, like the tourists. I can't tell.

Maybe they get less tired, which is something, but not as obvoius as it needs to be. And not that useful when your workers tend to build roads dead-last. If roads were that important and really improved effeciency that much, they should have build-order priority over everything except nearby buildings cranked up to maximum priority.

>Actually, I like how this works. Flat land is important, so watch that elevation setting when you set up your island!

There are other good ways to make flat land important--hills tire out workers more easily, high elevations get less rain and ard less vegitation (and beauty), grow crops less, etc. Ultimately, I think the ability to rotate buildings would make the land leveling speed less of a problem for me.

I agree that the almanac is a powerful tool and I too use it a lot. That's what makes the way it organizes info all the more frustrating sometimes.

I never have the problem with it opening to the cover--I went to the settings and turned off the yearly almanac, because I got tired of it popping up when I was trying to do something. =) I access it by clicking on the happiness bar, population, or money indecies, which opens it right to that page.

Started playing last night. Did you guys have to turn on 3D acceleration too? I have a GeForce2 GTS and when I started the game up it was in software mode. Hope that isn't the default and people will miss out on using their accelerators if they don't understand how that works...especially since I got a huge improvement in scrolling speed from it.

The people are amazing. There's so much activity. After going through the excellently voiced tutorial, I was just zipping around checking out the citizens. It's fun to watch them go about their business. I also liked the way a lot of the overlays worked with people by putting colored arrows over their heads to show happiness, etc. Same with the island itself and the crops.

Obviously I've basically just turned the game on for an hour or two so I don't have any in depth commentary on the strategies. I also watched the credits for the idle animations that didn't make it in. Some funny stuff there...

Only gripe was when I went to the tapestry to select a play mode. I had to start a new or load an old game in order to just quit out to the desktop. That was kind of goofy.

Looks like a lot of fun though and I can't wait to dig in.

--Dave

"Obviously I've basically just turned the game on for an hour or two so I don't have any in depth commentary on the strategies. I also watched the credits for the idle animations that didn't make it in. Some funny stuff there..."

I had the same experience with my copy of Tropico.

First, BE SURE TO ENABLE HARDWARE RENDERING IN THE OPTIONS! Weird, I didn't realize this came could use a 3D card. But it definitely speeds things up; the extremely zoomed-in view is almost too fast now.

It's also kinda fun to mess with the sprite quality and memory use page. It updates in real-time, so you can see the sprites get fuzzier and the memory usage drop as detail is lowered. I was getting up to 96mb of memory usage on maximum detail (!).

Second, do check out the credits. The dancing animations are a riot.

wumpus http://www.gamebasement.com

Actually, according to Phil those animations were not unused idle animations, but rather a joke on the part of one of his artists. Apparently they are just some stock animations that come with 3DS Max that they happened to apply to one of the character models one day, and it was so funny looking that they decided to use a bunch of them in the credits. Apparently it only took them a day or so to put them all together.

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Quote:

First, BE SURE TO ENABLE HARDWARE RENDERING IN THE OPTIONS!

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"BTW, where do you turn off the almanac pop-up Jason?"

Assuming Jason doesn't mind me butting in...

Click on the little book icon on the lower right of the screen, beside the round window. It brings up a bunch of buttons, one of which is settings. You'll find adjustable volume levels, resolution, etc. here. One of the options is to turn off the annual almanac.

-Tom

Thanks for the assist, Tom. I'll check it out as soon as I can fire up the game. Kids are playing at my feet and I've got a lot of house crap to do. I was in there looking around last night (where I found the 3D acceleration not enabled...) and just must have missed it.

--Dave

Boy do I feel dumb. It was right there in the middle of the settings page. That'll teach me to try playing a new game at 2AM. :P

--Dave

Question - is the final build much different than the preview build? I had a blast with the preview build, but the economy was a bit tough to balance. They make it any easier?

Jason wrote:

"...I don't want to know about "housing quality" so much as I want to know how many people live in each building type, for instance."

One way to get this information is to go to Information Tab > Buildings > Capacity, which will color-code all of the buildings on the map according to how full of residents/customers they are. This makes it pretty easy to tell at a glance how your housing needs are being met.

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If I may chime in on the need to rotate buildings -- It's not only an issue of available level ground, it also matters where a building's entrance is located.

Each structure has only one tile through which Tropicans can enter and exit, so the placement of this entry point has a direct effect on how accessible the building is. If it faces away from its main approach, people have to travel around the building to get inside. This results in a cumulative time/energy waste that drives nitpicky gamers like me crazy!

And yeah, roads don't really seem to work at all, although I managed to delude myself into thinking that people travel faster on them.

Hey All,

While the roads may not be worth the effort or cost, I'll bet it does have to do with fatigue and I know I saw a teamster book once he hit a road. It may also minimize the speed/fatigue penalty for climbing hills (no proof of this, however).

My only bitch so far is that these factions appear so static. Like all they represent is a number from 0 to 100 (converted into a nice descriptive adjective) that simply reacts to your edicts and building choices. While I'm sure you could piss them off into action, I never feel that they're acting on their own iniative. Like what difference does a faction's leader really make? I guess you can hope that by eliminating the given say, communist leader, that his replacement has lower courage and leadership stats but even then I don't really understand what this individual represents for a faction. It seems like the messages you get from each faction are pretty canned and triggered only if you are ignoring their zone of influence.

Oh, are prisons for anything more than political prisoners? I mean if I build a prison will the only prisoners be the ones I arrest via edicts? It might be nice if you could catch some of those invisible criminals (whatever the red shaded crime element is) but I'm doubting that "crime" thing is really attributed to anyone.

Does crime actually have any effect in the game short of population happiness and maybe the "quality" of the neighborhood?

I must agree with the 60 sec bit. I didn't find the game to my liking. How annoying are those shacks popping up in the land where you want to place some other buildings.
Engine is hardly suited for little people sim like other sim's of that sort with months as the time passing measure. Music is nothing fancy, sort of the tunes playing at the local spanish station, after few mins I have to turn that crap off to save myself from splitting headache. Other things annoy me but I'm watching xfiles to try and recall em now