Tropico 3

October 30th, 2009

Tropico 3 Overviews

Engage in a tropical power trip! Become the dictator of a remote island during the Cold War. Charm, persuade, intimidate, oppress, or cheat your people to stay in power! Are you a kind and generous leader? A corrupt and ruthless tyrant ruling with an iron fist? Turn your island into a tourist paradise or an industrial power. Make promises to the electorate or slander political adversaries to get the crucial votes for the upcoming elections. Send your avatar to congratulate the people, visit the island of another player, or just sun-bathe on the Caribbean beach. Play the Cold War superpowers against each other to your maximum advantage. Tropico 3 offers a tongue-in-cheek, light-hearted take on real world issues like third world politics, corruption and totalitarian regimes. Are you ready to rule your own banana republic? If you answered yes, then Tropico 3 is the game for you. Features: * A Comprehensive campaign with 15 new missions * Multiple ways to make money including Commerce, Industry, Mining, Agriculture etc. * A timeline editor to create fictional events or real ones * Avatar function lets you travel the Island as El Presidente – Each avatar is a customizable character that the player creates and controls – Choose gender and customize face, hairstyle, facial hair, hat, clothing, and additional accessories * Speeches, edicts and many ways to gain influence * A wide range of editing and moderation functions * Mission generator for random map creation, including unlimited Pesos, etc. * The Cinematic highly detailed Graphics simulate the actual caribbean * Visit islands controlled by other players * Online scoring against other players

Tropico 3 Feature

EL PRESIDENTE IS BACK! Rule as all-powerful, El Presidente as you decide whether to turn your tropical island into a vacation paradise, a prosperous industrial nation or JAIL the masses in your Banana Republic
Features a comprehensive campaign mode with 15 unique and challenging missions. Players can now explore a gorgeous, 3D world. Tropico 3 is the latest sequel to the critically acclaimed, award-winning strategy/sim classics Tropico and Tropico 2.
You rule your Caribbean island as El Presidente intimidating political opponents, giving populist speeches and enjoying the Island flair!
A timeline editor, online functionality and sensational Latin soundtrack take Tropico 3 to the next level of fun

Tropico 3 System Requirement

Tropico 3 minimal system requirements
• OS: Windows XP / Vista
• CPU: 2.4 GHz single-core
• RAM: 1 GiByte
• HDD: 5 GiByte
• GPU: 256 MiByte, Shader Model 3.0 (Geforce 6600 / Radeon X1300)

Tropico 3 recommended system requirements
• OS: Windows XP / Vista
• CPU: 2.4 GHz dual-core
• RAM: 2 GiByte
• HDD: 5 GiByte
• GPU: 512 MiByte, Shader Model 3.0 (Geforce 8800 GT, Radeon HD 4800)

The dual-core recommendation should be taken seriously. Tropico 3 uses two cores and requires a fast CPU in general.

For our brief benchmarks we use two popular graphics cards which are combined with a Core 2 Quad Q9550. They have to run Tropico 3 at the highest and lowest zoom level as well as five quality settings. As you can see in the diagram below, the Q9550 already gets the limiting factor on lowest zoom level and medium details – even more so on ultra details. I the highest zoom level the Geforce GTX 260-216 is about 20 percent faster than the Geforce 8800 GT and the processor is apparently still the limiting factor. For maximal details we recommend a modern dual- or quad-core CPU with a high frequency. By overclocking the Q9550 to 3.6 GHz the framerate was increased drastically – about 20 additional frames per second were possible on lowest zoom level.

Players with a knack for micromanagement and looking for a big power trip may be interested in Tropico 3. In this third installment, like its predecessors, players take the role of a national leader, El Presidente, of a tropical island. Under your direction, the tiny nation needs build up an economic infrastructure from practically nothing, tend to the needs of its citizens, and get out from under the shadow of influence of superpowers like the United States and the USSR. However, being a national leader takes more than tending the peoples’ every whim. In order to get a high score, players will need to skim a little here and there to put away for a retirement fund. Balancing power between what’s good for your nation and what’s good for you will be a constant act as the game progresses.

Checkout Tropico 3

Tropico 3 assigns players a single goal: to stay in office for the duration of their term. The campaign will assign specific tasks to players, like generating a set number of exports or putting down a local guerrilla rebel group, but the overarching goal of staying in office remains constant. In order to obtain this goal, players will have a number of both honest and underhanded moves at their disposal depending on the buildings they have. Every dirty trick has a consequence, so players will have to think carefully before trying to rig an election.

While the goal may be straightforward, there are still plenty of ways to lose. At the start, managing an island becomes an exercise in patience, as players try to satisfy the nation’s need for a strong economy and adequate housing without falling into debt. Demands rush at you quickly, and our approval rating dropped faster than we could get structures built to serve the existing population. Also add in the fact that it takes a long time for crops to grow for exports and the shipping freighter only comes intermittently, and it makes for a very slow start. Much of the game is spent waiting for that shipping freighter or foreign aid to come rolling in so that you will finally have some money to work with. Airports cannot be used for shipping goods, only tourism, which is a very strange oversight.

Things have a tendency to go downhill soon, and players will often have to swim upstream against a low approval rating. While that’s happening, there’s the ever looming threat of not getting enough votes for reelection, but that soon becomes the least of the player’s problems. Rebel groups start sprouting up to launch guerrilla attacks across the island, forcing players to either invest in a personal army or be driven out of office by force. Things can also go badly when things are going well, since the two global superpowers may suddenly gain an interest in doing more than just sending aid to your little nation, and could launch an invasion to gain its resources.

Although the campaign can be challenging, it’s fairly straightforward. There are a number of different islands, each with a unique background and supply of resources. As stated earlier, each island has a specific goal to achieve before the term runs out. Ones with few natural resources will have to rely heavily on developing tourism to thrive. However, the process of developing a new nation usually doesn’t feel much different from the last. Players will be repeating much of the same process for each island, no matter what the objective is. So the sandbox mode, where players can generate a random island according to parameters and have access to all building types, ends up being the most fun. It’s unfortunate that generated islands can’t be saved for later use, forcing players to keep specific save games to overcome this oversight. There’s a nice selection of pre-made sandbox islands, but there’s no description other than a vague “easy,” “moderate,” or “hard” designation, and there’s no way to know exactly what they mean without jumping in head first.

Actually playing Tropico 3 requires a fair degree of guesswork. For starters, even though fertile areas are highlighted, it’s tough to tell exactly how much room a farm will take up or in which direction it will expand, making it difficult to plan out an agricultural area. Players will also need to construct a network of roads so that goods and people can quickly get across the island, but it’s based on a peculiar set of rules. Citizens get cars from huge parking garages, but those cars mysteriously vanish once they reach their destination, forcing them to walk back to their homes. In order to have an efficient transportation system, players need to drop these large and costly structures wherever islanders might need to pick up a ride. Since there’s no miniature version of the parking garage, the amount of real estate these things take up can completely throw off island planning. These garages can also become overloaded, which slows down the efficiency of the transit system. Although the game will pop up a message stating that one of your garages is overworked, it doesn’t point to which one, so players will have to hunt through their garages and rearrange their planning to make room for another in hopes that they’re supplementing the right one. Players can’t reconstruct the island’s landscape by building roads over mountains or blasting tunnels through them, so they’ll have to design an road system that goes around them. Adding to the chaos is the fact that factories that aren’t producing can’t be temporarily shut down until further island development is put in place. The only way to stop a factory is to destroy it.

Tropico 3 starts players off in the 1950′s and the presidential term can continue for as long as fifty years. However, there’s no sense of the changing times during that duration. Even though global statistics might change, like the minimum wage in the Caribbean, and players can enact progressive edicts like approving same sex marriages or modernizing the military, the buildings and citizens are frozen in time. Even as players hit the 1980′s, the radio will still be playing the same music, the buildings will be unchanged, and the people will be wearing the same clothes. Even gender roles will be static, as only women will be allowed to work as high school teachers and journalists while only men can become doctors and college professors. Some of these gender oriented professions become strange, because both men and women can work in the factories but only college educated women can become engineers at the power plant.

However, even with these and other flaws, Tropico 3 taps into the mad scientist part of the brain, eager to conduct social experiments. There’s also the pleasure of watching a nation come to life and thrive under your leadership, especially since the little characters and buildings are so wonderfully detailed. The hours melt away and before you know it, Tropico 3 has eaten up your whole day. It’s that kind of feeling that makes the game worth owning. The gameplay issues might make it worthwhile for more frugal people to hold off a bit until there’s a sale, but the game is complex and entertaining enough as is to get players fully engrossed. Once you land on this little island, it’s hard to leave.