Tropico 6 from Limbic Entertainment

[Space Satan]

I have been always convinced that if Kalypso creates the kind of video games I would love to play myself

YOU ARE THE PROBLEM!

 

[Nutria]

If he's gonna rape the corpse of one of the best games of all time, I guess it's at least nice of him to take his time and do it right. Funny how he mentions a "Carribean island" when all the sequels have made it more and more generic.

 

[Aemar]

Delayed again: https://blog.kalypsomedia.com/en/open-letter-to-the-tropico-community/

And Tropico 6 is good, but not very good, or outstanding. Yet.

Yours sincerely

Simon Hellwig, Owner and Managing Director of Kalypso Media Group

This guy is so piss poor at selling his own game. He tells us his product is somewhat decent and that he needs a couple of more months to make it outstanding. I assume he's refering to additional features, and not to the fact they still need some extra time to iron out the bugs. Any gamer who wasn't born yesterday knows that it takes way longer than that to put in additional content.

The weather forecast for the island of Tropico (March 29, 2019): major shitstorms.

 

[wwsd]

While waiting to see if the new game is going to be any good, I just remembered that I also have Tropico 4 still lying around, and wow, you guys weren't joking when you said it's similar to 3. Almost all the assets look the same, including buildings and icons. Haven't delved into the campaign much though. Doesn't seem to be much new stuff except a bit more import and export options, ministers, and poorer music (3 was good, 1 was the best of course). Oh, and Twitter/Facebook integration. Derp. I paid pennies for it, but imagine paying full price for Tropico 3 in 2007 and then again for Tropico 4 in 2011. I'd feel cheated.

 

[Space Satan]

release in 6 hours

 

[fantadomat]

LoL,another one....fuck this franchise is like the fucking dynasty warriors games . They just remake the same game over and over again.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019-03-29-tropico-6-review-a-gentle-revolution

Tropico 6 review - a gentle revolution
Havana great time.

A new developer doesn't rock the boat in what's an enjoyable if only gently iterative outing for the construction and management sim.

Here's my gaming metaphor of the day: Tropico is like that one friend you have - you know the one - who you see at regularly reoccurring events and don't speak much outside of that. Whenever you do manage to catch up with them, though, it's like you've never been apart.

Tropico used to come around every 2 to 3 years with a few new features, the core idea always intact. You take control of a dictator tasked with leading their island nation - and their own wallet - to glory. How things play out is dictated less by you and more by the demands of the factions that represent the different interests of your people. Ignore their demands for too long and you risk a rebellion.

Under new developer Limbic Entertainment factions are the main feature the sixth instalment introduces. Rather than gentle nudges from one or two factions to keep up with things, you now eventually deal with all eight available factions simultaneously. It's impossible to make everyone happy, as every demand you fill for one group will cost you standing with another. To turn Tropico into a thriving paradise you need to keep things in balance, traditionally the last thing you expect from a despot.

Of course you have some ways to bend the populace to your will. You can always put overly demanding faction leaders in jail or arrange accidents. Elections are optional at best, and if your farmers work around the clock for a few months or years in a bid to raise productivity, who's really counting? Such actions will naturally lead to dissent in the long run and are thus more of a last-minute hat trick for getting out of a bind.

Tropico 6 ditches its predecessor's dynasty system, which let El Presidente gain attributes through members of his clan. Instead, you can now assign your dictator an attribute during the initial character creation. The options are not expansive, but helpful without making things overly easy: a particularly charming Presidente will for example immediately have a slightly increased standing with all factions. Money you've siphoned off to your Swiss bank account now goes to a broker instead, who offers you a number of much more useful in-game perks in exchange. Here I've finally found a worthwhile incentive to manage my Swiss bank account on top of everything else to use it as my personal savings account for indulgences such as amending the constitution.

Limbic acknowledges lack of space as a routine endgame woe and now gives you an archipelago of at least 3 islands. You can experience the different infrastructural challenges this presents through 30 sandbox maps or 15 individual missions. The missions, while certainly a good opportunity to experience gameplay during different eras, didn't give me much. The idea to adjust your strategy to fulfil the mission objective is sound, but in practice this means next to nothing since Tropico 6 is fundamentally a game where someone threatens to revolt while you fill the demands of another. Everything is ultimately down to balance, as precarious as it might be, whether you're trying to avoid war while clearly prioritising one country's demands over all others or trying to find alternate sources of happiness for a population that lives solely in shacks.

The central point of criticism regarding Tropico 6 is the same it's ever been: the setup makes it seem like you have the power to be as evil as you want to be, but it's never a sustainable approach.

Having several islands to work with is a major factor in what makes the game so busy, especially since the efficiency of your buildings and ultimately your whole operation depends on people and wares getting from A to B as quickly as possible. Opening a mine on a remote island effectively means setting up a tiny mining colony since people need to live close to their workplace or have the means to commute there as quickly as possible. If you cluster most of your job and entertainment opportunities in one place, you quickly run out of space, risk high pollution and essentially end up with London, and we can all agree that really no one wants that. Starting with the World Wars era, you can build bus hubs and bridges to ferry people where they need to go once you run out of living space right on capitalism's front lawn, an important step in growing your island empire.

The raid system makes a return all the way from Tropico 2. It's a mere resource gathering tool at first, allowing you to send a band of pirates fish for loot and "rescue" people to gain immigrants, raids take a more political nature once you use your operatives to spy on the general populace. It's by far the most interesting new feature, as it doesn't solely exist to make things easier for you. You can sabotage a country and risk a war in the process. Similarly, the new option to steal one of the world wonders to boost one of your population's stats is generally frowned upon. Tropico 6 feels a little more difficult than its predecessors, simply because between all the demands, there are plenty of stats to juggle and perhaps sometimes even build a city. For some reason, the pacing always seems off however, as I alternate heavily between normal game speed whenever I have to micromanage an aspect of my islands and full speed as I wait for resources to trickle in.

Tropico may never truly fulfil its potential as political satire sim, but the new options in the series' latest instalment bring it a step closer to that ideal. I've enjoyed my time with plenty of new buildings and the reliable hook that the game provides by giving you a set of new tasks just as you've gotten ahead of everything. Always a joy to come back to, Tropico 6 is no revolución, but offers the gentle stirrings of change.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/03/29/tropico-6-review/

Wot I Think: Tropico 6

Islands change everything. What would be just a map option to split the landmass into sea-divided blobs in so many other city-builders or strategy games is, in cod-Caribbean management sequel Tropico 6, transformative. For this most conservative of management series – you’re a better man than me if you can easily tell the previous three games apart – even the smallest change can make a profound difference.

Tropico’s long been a game played as much for mood, a dream of eternal sun and a zen state of building calm, as anything else. Making the new archipelago format, an empire built across scattered shores, melt neatly into that sensory pleasure, rather than disrupt it, is not as straightforward as it sounds.

Part of why islands work so well here is that they gently switch up the traditional goal of expansion for expansion’s sake. Instead of a circle of industry relentlessly pushing outwards, now the other islands become something to strive for; distant, initially impossible-seeming goals.

Equally impossible-seeming is that your attentions and affections could possibly be divided between multiple places. Your first island will, for hours, seem so vital and precious. I regarded the other islands with suspicion, as unwelcome irritations-in-waiting. But, like the new well of love that opens up in your heart should you have a second child (unless they’re a git), it turns out that the capacity to care just as much about another island is there, once the moment is at hand. I grudgingly built a dock on a second island an hour or so in, intending only to haul ore from it back ‘home’ to the main island, leaving it an otherwise uncolonised no man’s land.

A few hours later, it was a hive of mines, factories and farms, all kept neatly away from my increasingly postcard-perfect housing and leisure main island. Later, I had an island dedicated to tourism, the monied, gullible fools kept well away from what I thought of as The Real Tropico. Later still, another island was coated from shore to shore in solar farms and wind turbines, discreetly providing all the clean energy my now fossil-free ‘home’ could ever need.

They were all my precious babies, equally-loved. Some were connected by bridges, some by funiculars, some by boat; the hive of motion around and over them was delightful. It’s now impossible to imagine a Tropico that isn’t split into islands. Surely it was ever thus?

“It was ever thus” has been both selling point for and black mark against the last few Tropicos. It would be a lie to claim that, outside the islands, there have been many dramatic changes in 6, but I rarely felt as though I was simply repeating myself. Most components return, of course. The choice to be cuddly, Castro or Stalin; playing politics with various external nations; juggling profit and war, domestic and touristic interests; unbridled capitalism vs green sensibilities. I know it all well, and the toothless comedy take on dictatorship remains as insipid as ever – though I’m glad to say that did feel a little less in my face, this time around.

But I don’t feel like I’m going through the motions. The challenge feels a little stiffer, not unreasonably so, but just enough that worrying about where the money’s coming from and how to keep enough factions on side to get me through another election was a constant concern. It keeps me on my toes without actively blocking me from my expansion plans, instead of treating me like a slow-moving retiree who just wants to plop down sun-kissed shanty towns at their leisure.

There are a few elements, such as the Raids used to gain bonus resources, build Superpower alliances and heist the occasional world wonder, which feel a bit like they fell down the back of the interface’s sofa, but once you know where they are and how they work, clearly that goes away.

I wasn’t totally wild about road placement either, which on the one hand does a neat job of automatically curving and bending as you try to drag a path around your various mines, farms and shacks, but on the other hand will stubbornly refuse to allow perfectly reasonable-looking turns or veer off course because of some invisible bump in the terrain. This often necessitated demolishing and re-placing multiple structures just so a main thoroughfare through my growing settlement didn’t wind up in a dead end. It feels like the sort of thing which could be tweaked, but as it is it unnecessarily complicates bigger concerns.

Something which does not complicate bigger concerns, I’m glad to say, is warfare. Though it’s always talked about as a possibility, you can turn all conflict off with in-game policy decisions that even disable the building of military structure, so it doesn’t even feel like the cheat that flicking a ‘no mean men’ menu option would. Alternatively, you can go full-throttle for that stuff with policy choices and how you interact with various off-screen factions. To me, it feels like someone dropping a tuna steak on top of my ice cream sundae, but horses/courses.

Non-military foreign policy isn’t the strongest card in Tropico’s hand (all the cards have pictures of pineapples on the back, obviously) either, the superpowers constituting little more than robotic points-trackers that can spit out a bunch of cash if you keep ’em at a certain level. They’re effective in terms of giving you a leg-up to advance your nation to new eras, but achieve little in terms of setting its place in the world. The map is the map is the map, with no real sense that there’s anyone real outside it.

I want to say that I wish Tropico could lean in harder to how it handles and depicts other nations, in preference to continuing to fall asleep with its hand on the comedy despotism wheel, but on the other hand I don’t really want more getting in the way of gradually transforming island wilderness into hive of colourful industry. Tropico 6 offers a series of scenarios, with their own themes and challenges, but sandbox mode is where the real party’s at, with various options to turn off impediments to expansions and indulge in the sheer sprawl of a nation grown across multiple, bridge-linked islands, its people ferried between vast hubs of work and life by boats, buses, metros, cable cars. Airports, spaceports – it keeps on snowballing. All of this began with a few shacks in the sand.

Past a certain point, a long-term Tropico 6 sandbox session leaves the cosiness of yore behind and really explodes, in size, complexity and sun-kissed spectacle. That’s where the real difference between 6 and the last few makes itself known. A collection of features and buildings, big and small, combined into something that ultimately has you sit back and exhale in proud surprise at all you have done, how far you have come.

It is, very much, A Tropico Game, but it knows how to go big, how to feel like it’s playing with the citybuilder big boys, instead of remaining in its safe soft play corner. There’s plenty of stuff I’d change, especially tonally and in terms of international relationships, but I played it happily until I couldn’t see straight. I’m left thinking it should have called itself Ultimate Tropico rather than the implied exhaustion of sticking at 6 at the end.

https://www.pcgamer.com/tropico-6-review/

TROPICO 6 REVIEW
A strong and stable return, but can Tropico 6 earn your vote?

Tropico 6 is a great game for people watching. It's a satirical city builder in which every one of the citizens of your banana republic is simulated. You place a mine. You watch as a construction crew makes its way over to the building site. You watch as the newly constructed mine's employees start digging for gold or coal or uranium or whatever. And you watch as teamsters come to take the raw materials to a factory for processing.

When it's all going well, there's a calming rhythm to the bustle of your island. When it's not, you find yourself scouring around the map, trying to diagnose problems. Why hasn't the mine been built? Why are the workers off-site? Why haven't the goods been transported? Why is the processing plant out of raw materials? Why isn't the shipment at the docks? The next cargo ship won't arrive for six months, and if I don't complete this trading order soon the Axis forces are going to declare war on me because of the time I used them as a scapegoat to win an election.

The focused, individualised simulation means that small inefficiencies can balloon into big problems, and the behaviour of your citizens feeds back into wider systems in interesting ways. That's why—while there is a sandbox mode with plenty of different islands and options—often the Tropico series is at its best during the campaign missions, where specific requirements force you to adapt.

In sandbox, you can go slow, sensibly growing your island, diligently pursuing new financial ventures, effectively placating political factions and superpowers. You have the space and freedom to effectively manage your growth as you progress through the different eras. But the missions – presented as an anthology of past adventures, narrated by your trusty aide Penultimo – throw in entertaining curveballs to overcome.

Each focuses on a different aspect of the game, be it the spread of propaganda, the challenges of mass tourism, the balancing act of international relations, or the benefits of light piracy. The latter is one of the most entertaining. Starting on an island with virtually no natural resources, you're required to pillage raw materials to then manufacture into more profitable goods. The raid system is a powerful new tool, essentially gifting a regular trickle of goods, immigrants and, in later eras, beneficial propaganda and even falsified tourist reviews. Having to create supply chains that aren't supported by local crops is a meaningful twist on a standard campaign.

If there's a downside to raids, it's that there's no major downside. Foreign powers have traditionally taken a dim view to piracy, but in this, a game that specifically pokes fun at international relations, it just doesn't come up. You do at least get a negative reputation modifier for stealing famed national monuments like Saint Basil's Cathedral or The /actual White House/, but it's easy to mitigate and goes entirely unremarked upon when said nation next gets in touch to demand you complete some petty task.

The only thing that can placate them? Building a golf course.

Some missions aren't as successful. One, in which El Presidente launches a grand experiment to abolish housing, sounded promising, but in practice just meant working around the negative opinion modifier that poor housing confers. Citizens can protest and even rebel, but, just like superpowers, they're too easy to placate—even when they don't have a roof over their head.

Where the missions excel, however, it's in forcing you to take actions that can upset the delicate balance of economic growth. If political strife always feels manageable, financial ruin is a more immediate danger, especially when progressing through to a new era. A few times I've gone from comfortable profit to uncontrollable decline, as upkeep and wages outgrew my production thanks to some ridiculous request from a faction leader.

Tonally, Tropico is almost too broad and bawdy to be considered satire, but the over-the-top absurdity does lead to some fun mission requests that feed comedy into mechanics. In one, for instance, the communists instruct me to dismantle religion, banks and mansions. This leads to outrage from the Capitalists. The only thing that can placate them? Building a golf course.

Tropico 6 was developed by new series stewards Limbic Entertainment, but you'd be hard pressed to know by just playing the game. It takes Tropico 5's era system, reintroduces Tropico 4's political speeches and work modes, and adds in a few new features designed to complicate supply chains and diversify systems. It looks a bit nicer – the Tropico series has always been very pretty – and the archipelagoes, bridges and tunnels add a few neat wrinkles to construction. That's about it.

Ultimately, this is still a series about people watching. The builder. The miner. The teamster. The factory worker. I've been watching these people perform the same tasks since I first encountered the series with Tropico 3. I'll probably watch them for many, many hours to come.

THE VERDICT
79

TROPICO 6
An entertaining but unambitious sequel that collects up the best features of previous games and adds in some interesting new twists.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Did they elaborate on their DLC policy this time? I hope they abandoned the micro DLCs with just one building.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

LoL,another one....fuck this franchise is like the fucking dynasty warriors games . They just remake the same game over and over again.

i wish this was true. dynasty warriors games get worse and worse. seems like tropico follows the same path.

 

[flyingjohn]

LoL,another one....fuck this franchise is like the fucking dynasty warriors games . They just remake the same game over and over again.

i wish this was true. dynasty warriors games get worse and worse. seems like tropico follows the same path.

Not really.
Dynasty warriors 8 is a big improvement over 7 and 6.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i still prefer 4 over them. it might have fewer bells and whistles but it's the only one where there's a reason to use either light or heavy attack.

 

[BrotherFrank]

These reviews were rather unhelpful unless you're a total neophyte to the series.

First of all you have to be a major pleb not to be able to differentiate trop 5 from 3-4. 5 is the one with multi, playable militaries where you can fight foreigners, era system+dynasty system and finally, a broken economy in the late game because the number of citizens and workers you can get are hard capped making big islands impossible to play as you were unable to fill vital industries and infrastructure jobs.
So ok, era system is still in and dynasties are ditched in favor of a regression (you used to be able to pick TWO traits before), but how is the combat systems now, the multi and the end game economy?
What about the almanac and other elements tropico 5 dumbed down or outright removed?

Nothing in these articles has convinced me the archipalego stuff is anything to get excited about, having to built independent communities or at least make sure people can travel to their workplaces where you built remote mines has always been the case in tropico.
Anyways in conclusion I got no idea if to expect a better Tropico 5 or a worst Tropico 3-4 as once you cut out the flowery prose there is very little info of substance.



Also best dynasty warriors was 3, that voice acting was just on another level, sadly it really did seem to get worst with each new installment for my tastes.

 

[Nutria]

Tropico is like that beautiful exotic girl who you had a torrid romance with in your youth, the one who was absolutely unique in the whole world. And then she spent the next 15 years getting plastic surgery to make her look as bland and average as possible and now they plastic surgery is all turning bad and she looks awful. Oh yeah, and she also got repeatedly gang-raped by talentless Europeans over those years too.

 

[majorsoccer]

I want Stalin,Lenin,Putin,Hitler,Maduro,Hugo,Fidel,Trudeau,Che,Pol,Mao,Hideki,Kim,Hillary,Obama,Macron,Merkel,Soros,Marx,Jesus,Mandela,Martin,Malcom as playable characters.

 

[Nutria]

I have to disagree with you there. In the original game the characters were like Castro, Trujillo, Papa Doc, I can't remember everyone. But it was about the Caribbean in the 1950s-1990s. I grew up in a world where most of the Earth's population was living in unimagineable poverty and getting fucked over by dysfunctional Third World governments. Also it was the Cold War so proving that communism was not the answer was a big deal. Solving those specific problems is a lot more interesting to me than playing a game where you're just some random dude owning a random resort hotel trying to make money out of it.

 

[Jugashvili]

Tropico is like that beautiful exotic girl who you had a torrid romance with in your youth, the one who was absolutely unique in the whole world. And then she spent the next 15 years getting plastic surgery to make her look as bland and average as possible and now they plastic surgery is all turning bad and she looks awful. Oh yeah, and she also got repeatedly gang-raped by talentless Europeans over those years too.

It's not even the same girl, it's an entirely different person who happens to have the same name. Haemimont/Kalypso bought up the Tropico brand to bank on nostalgia and make a quick buck but they obviously never gave a shit about the setting and mood and should have called their game something else entirely. For instance, "Goofy Tropical Beach Resort Simulator", "Those Wacky Caribbeans" or "Le Ebin Presidente Maymay ecks dee". They could even make a spinoff about Greece and pay denbts lel, I bet that would sell like hotcakes in Germany, their target market.

 

[Metro]

I'll hold out for Tropico 7... er... 9.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

So this is where the smell of rotten franchise was coming from.

 

[Space Satan]

The good:
- Transportation seems less messy.
- Constructing a building is no longer that infuriating as before
- You CAN lose an election now and broken promises have bigger impact.
- Faction intercation is easier.
- Swiss bank money now have uses.
- Raiding allows you to survive on resource and manpower shortages
The bad:
- You income is generalized. You seem to have quite the same income from everyting, no high-investment-high-reward options, you just...build industry chains and they provide some income because exporting raw resources cannot sustain even basic economy.
- Almost no way to specialize your island. To surviveyou have to make almost all industries.
- There are so many research that you are confused at the start and 90% of research is useless crap/
- Game turns into a waiting game too often.

 

[Raghar]

- Game turns into a waiting game too often.

So I can LARP properly? Million useless research feels realistic. That's also positive. Torturing your citizens and doing random useless project, or perhaps not that much useless.

 

[Nutria]

You CAN lose an election now

Interesting. As generic as it has become, if they've got features like that then maybe it can be the bland city builder of our time.

 

[Jimmious]

Generally Tropico 6 has a much better reception than 5 and people are claiming it's a better game in general. I'm getting interested. Heard especially nice things about the new AI

 

[Space Satan]

Well, there are no longer universal solutions, like, build oil rig and forget abot money shoratges forever

 

[True Ukrainian]

Have they at least dealt with the problem where the citizens late game refuse to stay in the homes you build for them and gets unhappy because they are sleeping on the street?