For Those Stuck on Better Red Than Dead

[Omnist13]

I was stuck on this too, playing on hard, but I restarted and it was super easy once I figured it out.

Production: Early on, you want to get a good economy going. Going for canned goods seems to be a great option. I ended up with 4 - 5 pineapple farms, 3 canneries, and a power plant to do this. The soil on the various plantations, including the starting ones, degrades over time and your exports will start to tank because the production drops (this is a part that I missed initially). To offset the degradation, build a few ranches and set them to Pasture Prohibition to create manure. Build Manure Spreaders near all of your plantations. Before you get too low on cash, its a good idea to create one or two embassies. The embassies will allow you to ask for aid and get $20K per aid request. Split your trade routes between powers (depending on era) to allow you to get aid every time its available an to keep the powers happy enough so they don't start pitting rebels against you. You don't want to build too fast and run out of money though. Alternate between production buildings, i.e a few pineapple plantations, a cannery + a power plant, an embassy, more plantations, another cannery. You can then start diversifying your production once you have good income. (i.e sugar plantations --> rum distilleries, cotton --> cloth, etc) If your canneries start running low on pineapples, create coffee plantations and upgrade your canneries to be able to utilize the coffee. You may need another power plant to do this since the coffee canning option requires more power.

Housing: Housing isn't supper important but building a few Flop Houses early to keep people happy and create housing near production buildings is a good idea as you can afford it. DO NOT build House, Mansion, or Country House structures. You will have to demolish them later.

Factions: For the optional faction requests, just do them as you see fit but don't make the Capitalists happy since the goal of the mission is the opposite, to create happy Communists. The religious faction isn't important either since you are going to demolish their stuff and make them mad later. For all other factions, if you have the option, get additional support from them if its an option when you complete their requests. This will make winning elections easy. After figuring everything out, I think only 2 elections happened before finishing the mission.

Get 200 Communists: When you get the main requests where you are asked to start demolishing buildings DO NOT start demolishing stuff or enacting Edicts Communist Edicts until you have completed the request to get 200 Communists. I found the mission almost impossible to complete because once you get rid of the religious buildings, people stop reproducing (yes, this is a mechanic) and you never get a high enough population to have enough Commies. Going the demolition route before completing the get 200 communists, my population never got above ~350. Doing the get 200 commies before demolishing, my population was near 500 by the time I got the 200 commies. You will want to have one hospital and one clinic near your main city area. This will keep people from dying as well. Build 2 Newspapers (these are required for a main request anyway) and 3 Radio Stations, setting both to the commie propaganda setting. Your Childhood Museum and Mausoleum can actually act as propaganda buildings as well if you pick the option that converts Commies.

Research: Throughout the mission starting at the beginning, you will want to research the Edicts, Building work modes, and Constitution stuff you will need to complete the main requests later. I don't recall exactly which ones but I think they are Wealth Tax, Free Wheels, Newspaper, Radio Station. You may also need Religion and State and Labour Policy as well but that may have been for optional requests in my play through. Research Right to Arms last since it will make the liberty happiness main request later a ton easier.

80 Liberty Happiness: At this point, you don't need to convert people to Communism and your media buildings are currently decreasing liberty. Change them back to their default setting (i.e NOT issuing faction propaganda) and liberty will start going up. I don't think you can get to 80 doing this alone. Issue the Right to Arms edict which increases liberty to put you over the top.

Raids: Just keep Treasure Hunts going all the time unless you have to do something else for an optional request. Before you demolish the Commando building when you are required to, build a Spy Academy to keep your raids going and allow for completing espionage requests.

I THINK that was pretty much the strategy. Doing this went from WHAT THE HELL hard to wow, that was super easy.

[Milena Velba]

Only worked in theory just like communism lol...

[Omnist13]

Lol. Well you do have to drop Communist policy to get 80% Liberty so Communist didnt really work in Tropico either.