Tropico

When you start a random scenario in Tropico, you can customize your dictator, which has an important effect on the game mechanics. However, the various dictator traits aren't the least bit balanced. Some choices are definitely more useful than others, but the all cost the same. For this reason, it would have been nice if your score was affected, but it seems the point of the dictator character is more for role-playing than game balance. It does add a lot of flavor. In making a dictator with the maximum effectiveness as a capitalist, I ended up with a Silver Spoon background, a Capitalist Rebellion rise to power, and a Financial Genius who was Hardworking. For flaws, I just took two that seemed the least offensive: he was a Cowardly Womanizer. Unfortunately, the choice of cowardice was eventually his downfall. My presidency fell during a military coup in which one loyal soldier was shooting it out with one traitor. The soldier eventually fled in terror with a graphic of a squawking chicken over his head. The traitor took down my palace and thus ended my capitalist's reign.

Tropico keeps a list of your high scores, but there's no indication in these lists of your dictator's stats or what kind of game you were playing. There's a verbal debriefing at the end of the game, but no written evaluation. In terms of rewarding the player after a long game, Tropico can be a little disappointing.

There's no sense of runaway time in Tropico, since you can pause and tweak to your heart's content (you hear that, Chris Sawyer?). An important part of learning the game involves efficient building placement. The importance of a sensible layout in Tropico can't be underestimated. You have to take into consideration how people move in Tropico. They go to get food. They go to churches and pubs when they're so inclined. They live in a house and they have to physically move to their job site before anything gets done. If you put a construction office on one corner of the island, a marketplace in another corner, your laborer's house in a third corner, and the new building site in the fourth corner, nothing will get done. Your poor laborer will be walking all over creation and he'll get tired and hungry in the process.

Roads supposedly help people move faster, but they're awfully expensive and I can't tell how much of a difference they make. My most successful island did without roads. Slopes can be a major obstacle, since it takes a long time to even them out them for building. You can't take flat land for granted, since it gets used up quickly. In one game, I laid out a site for an airport, which takes up a lot of real estate. Twenty years later my game was over and construction on the airport proper hadn't even begun because it was taking so long to hew out a flat area on the side of the hill.

Tropico's economy relies on things happening in real time. To make money from cigars, for instance, people have to harvest tobacco. Teamsters carry the tobacco to a cigar factory. Factory workers turn the tobacco into cigars. Teamsters carry the cigars to the dock. You don't make money until your dockworkers load the cigars on a freighter. Since this is such a drawn out process, an entire year can pass without a supply of expensive cigars being delivered to the freighter. This can lead to a bouncing economy. One year, I might have a profit of $14,000 and the next I'm in the hole for $12,000. It seems difficult to make a smoothly running economy, especially in the later game when there's a lot of money changing hands.

Cont'd