Game Play

[jlking3rd]

I have been playing a sandbox in the Modern Era and have been having a lot of fun. As sort of a case study, I thought I would share my experience.

When trying to think about how to simplify the happiness of Tropicans, I settled upon the idea of stealing the Roman Coliseum. Once you have built the Coliseum, overall happiness only depends on a citizen’s food and entertainment happiness. I could save a lot of room by not building churches and hospitals and place smaller entertainment and food buildings close to where Tropicans lived and worked. It did work, but at the cost of a precipitous drop in the Religious and Conservative factions’ support. Also the EU was not particularly happy with me for stealing one of their signature landmarks.

With my poll numbers dropping before an election, I could not use Swiss bank account money on the Broker for help with the EU problem. Fortunately my standing with the EU had not dropped so low that they were no longer offering me trade deals, so I opened up trade imports with them, expensive imports t o be sure, like uranium, cars and electronics, but imports that would not take a long to fulfill. Ultimately in the long term you do not lose money on these types of import deals because you will just export them the next time a trade ship comes in.

Winning the election was a more pressing matter. I was able to use a ‘Convincing Talk’ with the Environmentalist to convince them to abandon a demand, and a back channel deal firmed up enough of the wobbly Conservative’s vote to get me elected. It was not that close, I still won with 59% of the vote without cheating – well OK - without cheating in anyway the press would find out about…

I decided I needed to write off the Religious faction (I’m a dictator, right?). Given that I was already dealing with an unemployment issue with high school educated Tropicans, I built newspapers, radio stations and T.V. stations and set the work mode to change people over to the Militarist. They are the opposite faction of the Religious, and I still had good standing with the Militarists.

That worked too! The number of supporters for the religious faction is going down, and my overall support is going up. So I doubled down and changed the Constitution to declare Tropico an atheists state, and legalize same sex marriages.

I suspect my alliances with the Militarist will come back to bite me. I am not sure I am willing to spend my resources on buildings that cost me money and offer me no revenue. I am Costa Rica after all, no one really wants to invade me. I think I am going to have to increase my media propaganda and change it to target changing people over to the Communists, Intellectuals and Environmentalists, which is pretty much what I use to do in Tropico 3 and 4.

That is just this Island. My next one it going to be a creepy Christian/Druid cult island… People who think Tropico is not a sandbox game have no imagination.

[Iskander]

I love reading game summaries from people who enjoyed playing that game! Keep it up!

[Kunovega]

It's not that Tropico hasn't had a sandbox, it's that in the context of the series it's only a small part of it

With enough imagination you can just boot up the UE4 editor and call it a game, the options are unlimited

[TurtleShroom]

See, this is something I would point to when debating the people that say T6 lost the soul of a "Tropico" game. This example is a "Dictator Simulator" in its prime.

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by TurtleShroom:

See, this is something I would point to when debating the people that say T6 lost the soul of a "Tropico" game. This example is a "Dictator Simulator" in its prime.

You haven't played the game, and what you aren't realizing is that while a handful of options exist like he describes: those scenarios existed in the previous tropico games as well

The complaints are related to how much is removed, not how much remains

Tropico 6 will be a functional game assuming more of the bugs are fixed, that's not the complaint. The complaint is that it contains less options and less control than previous versions

Can you still play in a sandbox and pretend you're a dictator? Sure, too bad it's with less options, less customization and less control over how