A lovely sunny demo has arrived on the shores of the internet: it’s for banana-republican management sequel Tropico 3! It’s 1.1gb in girth, and can be downloaded from here. As in previous games, you take the mantle of a benevolent dictator of a small island, and try to make the wheels of monopolistic money practices turn for both you and your citizens. The demo contains the tutorial and two missions from the full game, so it should give you a decent taste of how the full thing pans out. Have a play, let us know your thoughts.
Related Stories:
Loved the first game, and this seems virtually identical. Will buy.
After playing the demo, it’s pretty fun and I might think about buying it. It looks similar in premise to Anno 1404. Could someone whose played that compare the two of them?
Stuff like being able to rotate buildings better (if still not perfectly)
Rotating buildings with the mousewheel seems completely borked. It’s overly sensitive, so it’s impossible to get the proper alignment. Using the keyboard works fine, though.
It looks similar in premise to Anno 1404. Could someone whose played that compare the two of them?
It seems like Tropico 3 games will be a lot shorter than Anno 1404. There’s arguably no better city builder around than Dawn of Discovery, but it does mean a huge time investment (easily 12+ hours for a scenario). Obviously we’ve only seen the first couple of missions, but Tropico seems to be broken down into much smaller chunks.
Oh, and on a more mechanistic level, there seems to be much less resource management than in the Anno games. You need to meet your citizens’ needs, but (for the most part) you don’t need to produce and shift around specific goods.
No Anno 1404 for me then. If I want to spend 12 hours on a campaign, I’ll spend it on Civ 3. Why spend that much time building a city when you can build an empire? And I prefer to leave the resource management to the pure strategy games and leave it out of the city building games.
Fair enough if it’s not your thing. But it’s that whole supply chain thing that I love most about city builders.
I liked the supply chains from Caesar better than Anno. Of course you didn’t get to directly handle the trade routes, but actually reaching the best housing in Caesar was a big accomplishment. It seemed really easy in Anno (based on 1701).
Tropico was definitely a favorite of mine, so I’m really excited. It did always seem to be a bit rough around the edges when your island got too big, so if they fixed some of that and it looks pretty I’m sold!
I actually loved the fact that each individual had to do all the walking and waiting at line. Instead of just showing raw numbers on how your factory or clinic was doing, you could just follow people around to see what was working or not. I really thought the “smart citizens” of Tropico would become a city builder standard. One thing I didn’t like about Anno was that the residents were just numbers. The little people walking around my city didn’t mean hardly a thing. Caesar was better for this, but Tropico (and CotN) handled it the very best. Every sprite is an actual person. Awesome!
The walker model seems great on paper but it can cause some serious problems (I remember the hoops you had to jump through in Caesar to get them to do vaguely rational things, but I never played the original Tropico). Anno’s unusual in that while it takes a lot of time and effort to get to the top of the supply chain, the economic model itself is very stable. It’s rare to have the sort of death spiral that things like Sim City or Caesar would throw at you. So in that sense it’s easy. The challenge mainly comes from trying to get the most space efficient production system to support the largest number of high level people. In 1404, it can be pretty tough to get enough people in your main city to meet some of the scenario requirements, especially if you’re not aggressive in settling supply islands.