The Therapist Gamer

I'd never heard of the Tropico series until this entry, so I'm not sure how popular previous installments were.  It's a city building simulation game like Sim City, but with an emphasis on political and economic systems.  You start out on an island in the early 1900s, and as the years pass not only does technology improve, but your place within the world theatre changes as well.  Whereas you may pay money to the queen for military protection, you may later become independent but have embassies for other nations.  The US and USSR both try to recruit you to their side. Will you invest in nuclear weapons, or instead focus on tourism?  There are a ton of possibilities in this game.

 

I was impressed with how many facets of Tropico 5 were fleshed out.  For example, if you choose to have a democracy then you will need to regularly win elections, and thus maintain favor with the citizenry.  If you have a lot of churches then the religious folk will be happy and there may even be more religious people on your island. However, if this is the case then the science community will be annoyed that resources are not being spent on researching new technologies. If women are allowed to vote then rebels will be less likely to overthrow the government, but religious folk will see your policies as contrary to God's (or something like that).  Every decision you make is interconnected in what I thought was a fairly realistic fashion.

 

Each person on the island is more than just a number.  They have jobs, incomes, places they live, religious preferences, economic system preferences, opinions about warfare, and a myriad of other factors. Again, I thought these aspects of the game design did a good job of actually impacting gameplay.  For example, as time went on in my town I went from making a lot of money from agrarian and mining jobs to gradually building high schools and universities as higher educated people can get better paying jobs, and thus stimulate the economy more.  Years and years went by and I was pleased that a high percentage of my population had at least a high school diploma and many of them had college degrees.  I had four universities fully staffed and fully enrolled! In the meantime I was really struggling to get my mines and farms fully functioning.  I tried raising the wages to the highest amount and staffing the worksites with good leaders, but no one was working there.  Finally I realized that it was because my population was too highly educated!  Just like in real life, people with college degrees were simply unwilling to work in a coal mine and would wait for an office job to open up. So even though they were highly educated they had no money and couldn't afford the nice housing I had made available.  I had to demolish three of the colleges and only have a few staff at the remaining one so that the education level of the island more closely matched the pace of white collar job opportunities.  It really feels like your decisions matter, and that you have to think through all of the possible consequences of your decisions.

 

As I mentioned, each person has a variety of preferences and different traits about them.  These come into play as you decide what kinds of things to include in your constitution and what kind of economic policies to employ.  Perhaps you are a benevolent leader who gives people complete freedom of choice.  Well, if the timing is not right the people may not want that - they may want strict laws and enforcement as is congruent with their religious beliefs.  Say you become a strict dictator, and since times have changed they may not like that and instead want you to be that benevolent, freedom-loving nice guy.  You have to pay attention to the attitudes of your populace and how they are shifting if you want to get reelected (and thus stay in the game).

 

You can accomplish your goals in a wide variety of ways.  For example, there may be an extremely influential leader of a certain group, and that person happens to hate you.  If this is the case, all of the members of that group are more likely to dislike you.  So if the union boss is campaigning against you in the upcoming election, you have a few options on how to deal with him.  You can bribe him and try to get him to say nice things about you, and thus improve your popularity with union members.  You can have him arrested. You can spread gossip about him to discredit his opinions.  You can even have him killed.  All of these options come with pros and cons.  For example, if you have the union leader killed his influence over union members will immediately go away.  Some union members may vote for you out of fear, but some may grow to hate you even more.  A political killing also makes a rebel uprising or military coup more likely. Bribing seems like a safe option, but then people grow less trustful of the government and your regime.

 

All in all, I was gladly surprised by how well Tropico 5 is made.  It's not totally my type of game, but it was fun for the several hours I played it. It has an engaging campaign and a fun sense of humor throughout.  You can probably get this game for cheap and I think it's worth a try!