Cav's Place

I remember wanting to play the first Tropico ever since it launched, but never got around to it. Tropico 2 never really caught my eye, but when I heard of a Tropico 3, I immediately added it to the list of games I wanted to play, removing the first one from that same list a short while later. However, I still didn’t get around to playing it until Tropico 4 launched. At that point, instead of making another change to the list, I left the latest game for later and finally got around to obtaining the third one, including its expansion.
That said, you don’t make a note of wanting to play something for so long if you don’t expect to really like it, so there were certain expectations involved. Fortunately, the first few scenarios did meet said expectations, so I was hooked right away and quite willing to trudge through the few tedious moments that did appear later. Still, while I did play both campaigns and enjoyed the original one more than the Absolute Power one, I did have Absolute Power installed all along and can’t really say how the game would have been played without the changes and enhancements brought by the expansion. What I can say, however, is that it most likely was a far less interesting experience, so keep in mind which version this review is about.

The first thing that needs to be said about this game is that most of the time it’s fun and sometimes even funny. It could have taken itself more seriously, but it does not, instead maintaining a lighthearted tone even when the waters are rough and things turn sour. The wording of the important messages you receive, the names used, the brief radio broadcasts, the very limited but equally fitting music, everything keeps reminding you that it’s just a game, its purpose being to entertain. Considering the things you may end up needing to do, despite your best intentions, such a reminder is more or less required for those of us who tend to spend time thinking about the consequences of our actions.
Of course, you will need to think about the consequences of your actions anyway, but you probably won’t feel too bad about it when things go wrong. And things will go wrong, because thankfully, at least from my point of view, there are a whole slew of factors that need to be taken into consideration when developing your island, many of them being pleasantly realistic and therefore able to teach players a lesson or two, if they’re willing to notice. For example, notice how pollution constantly accumulates according to what buildings exist in an area and what edicts are issued, while a garbage dump, depending on how it’s developed and set to function, needs a certain amount of time to reduce it. Or how resources, including fishing stocks or soil quality, are depleted when intensively exploited. Or how areas plagued by poverty and inadequate housing are unsafe, while those populated by wealthier citizens who also benefit from good housing are very safe.
This kind of lighthearted, forgiving realism is, in my opinion, what makes this game addictive. And when you add it to the way some of the scenarios are created, you’ll see why you’ll probably find yourself hooked on it at least until you’ll finish the campaigns. This may actually go double for the original campaign, which tends to be based around long-term goals which are all the more rewarding when they are finally achieved. For example, I’ll certainly keep in mind how I worked steadily through my development plan for thirty game years during the original campaign’s final scenario, undaunted by the fact that, until the very end of this process, I didn’t think that I could complete it in time. However, once everything was finally done exactly according to my original plan, things instantly clicked into place and I could sit back and watch for a few years, until I had accumulated the necessary amount of money to win.

Unfortunately, the Absolute Power campaign tends to be based around short-term goals, offering you unclear objectives at the start of its scenarios and then multiple clear but less major ones while you play, requiring you to think quickly and meet them one by one before each deadline passes. It’s more stressful and less rewarding than the approach used in the original campaign, so I’m not particularly keen on it. I’m also not keen on it because needing to meet these goals on such short notice means that you’re far less able to care for your people, resulting in worse living conditions and the need to take harsher measures if you want to stay in power. I did my best to be a very democratic and benevolent leader during the original campaign, but the Absolute Power one, as the name implies, often made this impossible.
On the other hand, when I think that this approach was most likely meant to make the game more interesting, I have to look towards probably the only reason why it can get tedious and wonder why wasn’t something done about that. I’m talking about the start of the scenarios, which is more or less the same every single time, regardless of the background you’re presented with. I’d sure have liked to at least occasionally start with islands that are already developed, having objectives ranging from finding ways to develop further to making them more sustainable, improving efficiency or rebuilding after a major disaster. For me, that would have made it more interesting than throwing some weird background texts over nearly identical starting conditions and adding a whole bunch of scripted events later throughout the scenarios… Though I have to admit that some of those were nicely done too.
But while I’m at things that repeat themselves, I can’t not make note of the music and the radio broadcasts. I’m probably already nitpicking, because I already said that, even if very limited, they’re extremely fitting, but you will probably notice very quickly that the game’s soundtrack contains only a couple of songs, which are repeated over and over and over, and that you’ll be hearing either Juanito or Betty Boom say the exact same things time and time again over the course of the game, as there are apparently no alternate versions to be used, the game at most deciding which of the two will report on any given development. Not even that happens all the time, as some reports can only be presented by one of them, making it even worse.

When it comes to actual gameplay annoyances, something must be said about pathfinding. I have seen characters get out of cars some distance from their destination and then walk the rest of the way, sometimes even driving past the destination and then returning on foot. They may also choose other doors than those that face the road, sometimes walking all around a building before entering it. And they are also very determined to cause gridlocks by insisting on taking a certain route between two points even though that road is packed full but there are others available that are almost empty. During one scenario, I even made two roads exactly side by side to connect the two major developed areas, only to see that one was almost always gridlocked and the other nearly empty.
Speaking of roads, I would have really liked the option of building wider ones, with more lanes, but on many islands you can’t even connect areas with roads that are side by side, as there’s barely enough room for one in between cliffs or other such terrain obstacles. While I’m at it, I’d have really liked public transportation, tunnels and trains as well, but I guess that’d be way too much to ask when you can’t even build roads the way you want to. In fact, building roads properly is one of the trickiest parts of the game, and at times unnecessarily so. This is largely because there’s no tool to level the terrain as you need it, instead needing to make use of the tedious and unreliable process of trying to repeatedly place and remove roads or buildings, hoping that the terrain will eventually end up in a shape that’ll allow you to build what you actually want to build in that specific spot.
A minor annoyance that’s also connected to the above would be that doors aren’t clearly marked when you select something to build, forcing you to zoom in closely to make sure that they’ll be placed where you want them to if the road can only reach a certain spot. And while I’m at minor annoyances and buildings, I also need to point out that you can’t select the specific building type when there are more available, such as for fountains, gardens, trees or even farms, requiring you to keep clicking a button until the shape you want just happens to pop up. That’s unnecessarily frustrating, as is the fact that the exact reason why a protester is protesting isn’t listed if you check their latest thoughts…

In the end, while I once again rushed through the good parts but detailed even some of the minor annoyances, I have to point out that this game had me hooked for most of the time I played it. Yes, the first five or even ten years tended to be more of the same each time and there were moments when I didn’t quite feel like starting the next mission after completing one, and that Viva Tropico scenario from the original campaign was terribly difficult for something that can be unlocked so early in the game, but these moments that actually required me to make some effort to keep going were relatively few, those when I had a hard time quitting the game in order to do something else being more frequent.
It can at times be frustrating, sometimes unnecessarily so, but for the most part Tropico 3 is a fun and addictive game that can even have a few lessons to teach those who are willing to see them. You’ll see how much planning is required for sustainable development, how hard it is to run even a small country, how complicated it is to meet people’s conflicting demands, how the ends often do justify the means, how even your best intentions are constantly doomed to be twisted around and presented as hidden and dangerous agendas by your opponents… In a lighthearted, forgiving way, you’ll be put on the other side of the barricade and be shown some of the things that are wrong with our current methods of government, but also with the way we, the regular people, think of governments.
Or perhaps I played it entirely wrong and it has nothing to do with any of this, but just with keeping yourself in power by any means necessary, whether for personal gain or because it takes many years to accomplish anything important. At the very least, that should explain why supposedly democratic governments, made up of people who risk being removed from office every few years, have such a hard time getting anything done.

With Tropico 4 already released and said to be more or less just an enhanced remake of Tropico 3, I can’t tell you to go play Tropico 3 anymore, but it wouldn’t be a bad thing to at least try it, if only to decide for yourself if its successor is an actual improvement or not. I’ll probably see that for myself someday too, but probably not all that soon. That has nothing to do with what I thought of this game, mind you, but is a simple logical conclusion, considering how long it took me to even play one game in the series.

I’ve been having this post in mind for some two months, ever since seeing that comment on my post about the Georgia Guidestones, asking whether even such good promises of a better world could be worth giving up our liberties for. Yes, the comment itself was likely some sort of spam, but the idea certainly keeps being brought up, often as an argument against pretty much any method or measure that could actually get things done and create major positive changes in this world within a reasonable time frame, so I’ll have a go at it.

The fact of the matter is that liberty is inherently limited, even in anarchy. This becomes obvious when what some people want to do would prevent others from doing what they want to do, so even if there are no authorities to place such limits, they automatically appear when people’s desires clash against each other. And people’s desires constantly clash against each other, meaning that the lack of proper rules will almost certainly result in a “might makes right” scenario, the amount of liberty enjoyed by each person being directly related to their power and ability to take away the liberty of others in order to extend their own. This has been clearly proven throughout mankind’s history.
Laws and forms of government were developed as a result of this, in an attempt to create a more stable society. However, with very few exceptions, the strong form the governments and largely make laws that protect them from others who may challenge their positions. In truth, this does provide stability, the problem being that it doesn’t also provide a similar amount of fairness, plus that it wastes a large part of this potential to do good on selfish struggles for power… Then again, anyone who would end up in a position of authority and not do this would be removed from it soon after, replaced by someone more determined to grab and hold on to that position, almost certainly for personal reasons.

From the above we can determine that the amount of liberty enjoyed by a regular person, one who isn’t among the few powerful enough to obtain and maintain a position of authority, is now doubly limited, in part by the way said person’s desires clash with those of their peers and in part by the will of the authorities, be they formal or informal. This is how things stand, how they stood throughout history and almost certainly how they will stand in the future as well. The specifics may occasionally change, but the general idea remains the same, as this is pretty much the natural and unavoidable state of affairs. Any society needs rules in order to function, even if in some cases said rules may be informal and determined by whoever happens to hold the reins of power at any one moment, and any gathering of beings capable of independent thought results in a clash of desires sooner rather than later.
Knowing this, we can continue this senseless struggle for some utterly impossible ideal of unlimited liberty, or we can try to shape these inherent limits in a way that will result in as much fairness and as many positive changes as possible. We can keep trying to take power away from each other, forcing those who obtain it to put even more effort into holding on to it at the expense of everything else, or we can offer certain powers, along with the related liberties, to those who are most likely to use them to do the most good. It’s all a matter of choice, because the foundation is already there, the only difference being what we choose to have on top of it.

My view is that liberty should be reliably limited in such a way as to properly protect others from undeserved harm and the environment from damage that is beyond its short-term ability to repair locally. I should also note that by “others” I don’t only mean humans, but also any other animal capable of realizing what’s happening to it, of forming memories and of learning from them. While true that these other animals aren’t capable of clearly expressing their needs and desires in ways which most humans could easily understand, our privileged position on this planet also carries the responsibility of taking proper care of the other species we share it with, so we should keep that in mind whenever we want to do something. It may be difficult to create such fair rules regarding the treatment of so many species, not to mention the environment as a whole, but it is absolutely necessary.
On the other hand, the rules dealing with actions that affect people who are capable of making their own decisions and expressing themselves should be much easier to make. In fact, only two rules would be needed in most situations. The first would forbid any intentional action clearly seen as harmful by the person or persons affected by it unless said action is a just punishment for a crime, while the second would force the author to properly make up for any unintentional harmful action within a reasonable time frame after being made fully aware of the harm caused by it. Granted that there will be situations when performing an action would be seen as harmful by one affected person and not performing it would be seen as harmful by another, which creates the need for arbitration, but that system’s foundations are already in place as well, so we don’t need to do something new, but merely to do it properly for once.

To conclude, I’d certainly like to see a body appointed to handle such matters, without fear of retribution. It should be made up of people who would use their powers for the greater good and they should be guaranteed enough time in office to see their plans through to the end. Those plans should deal first and foremost with protecting the environment, humans and other more advanced animals from harm, doing absolutely everything necessary to prevent us from causing any more damage and then starting to repair the damage already caused as well, no matter how many people will hate the measures taken or the methods used. Something like this would certainly be worth giving up some liberties for, especially when it could offer even more in the long run.

Yes, it’s yet another personal update and it’ll once again be a quick one, because I’m in between things and want to post it before midnight anyway. Then there’s something else I need to write later tonight, though I’ll probably put it off until after I’ll eat, because right now I just woke up from a nap and will be forcing my mind to pull itself together quite quickly and very much against its wishes in order to quickly write this post. As such, I doubt it’ll like moving on to writing something else immediately afterwards, and doing that is hard enough even without such added complications.

Last week, I was saying that I had almost finished Tropico 3 and only needed to play a couple of sandbox games before truly being done with it. I have now done that, going through a quick “God mode” one today just to say that I did that too. The other one took a few days to complete, but I actually generated it so the listed difficulty was 200%, not just 100%, and went through the maximum of 50 years under those conditions, eventually reaching the end with the happiness of my citizens at 70% and therefore finally obtaining the happiness achievement as well.
I hope I’ll manage to write a review before the end of the year, perhaps even next week, but let’s see how that will work out. Right now I found myself moving straight on to Empire Earth, which was offered for free for two days by GOG.com, though of course the AI is wiping the floor with me from the very first scenarios. I really suck at such games, but I guess I’ll give it a shot and then decide whether I’ll keep at it or consider it a lost cause and move on to something else.

Otherwise, I’m actually quite proud to say that yesterday I managed to meet the first two conditions of that crazy plan of mine. It required me to wander around the city for six days and made me feel quite bad in quite a few ways, but at least it’s done now and I can move on to the third condition, which is the last one that actually depends on me. The fourth should also be handled as much as I possibly can, but I’m not the one who’ll have the final say, so it’ll only be a matter of doing my best and then hoping for a good outcome.

Last but not least, with this being this week’s first post and the end of the year being only two weeks away, it means I have five more posts to write, four of which are already planned to some extent. One will be the review for Tropico 3, another will include the details of this crazy plan of mine once it’ll either succeed or fail, while two more should be of the sort that’ll get filed under Society, because a couple of months ago I sort of set a goal of having more than 150 in that category by the end of the year. I won’t necessarily be writing any of the two or three I have in mind right now, but I’ll have to figure something out very soon, because this week’s second post will likely need to be one of these planned ones. If it’s not, then I’ll have my work cut out for me for the next two weeks, with no room to maneuver.

It‘s a collection of short stories, so not much to it, as I don’t take well to this sort of thing. But there are some interesting ideas in here, some of which are still just as relevant.

Rating: 3/5

I finally got around to starting the final scenario from the Absolute Power campaign yesterday and found it noticeably easier than at least a few of those that were unlocked before it, so kept playing until I won it. In truth, the listed difficulty is a mere 129%, which puts it below those unlocked in the previous batch, one of which went as high as 171%, not to mention that, if I remember correctly, seven of the 15 from the original campaign had a listed difficulty of at least 200%, the last one going all the way to 300%.
That said, now I still need to play two sandbox games to say that I truly finished Tropico 3. One will be the “God mode” one, which will be a walk in the park, but the other will be hard, because I mean to activate both “rebel yell” and “free elections”, making for a very difficult start despite otherwise aiming for a listed difficulty of only 100%. Actually tried it once before, but failed, so now I’m hoping that I learned a few more things and will manage it, so I’ll be able to finish and also review the game by the end of the year, despite keeping myself rather busy with something else these days.

What I’m keeping myself busy with is an insane idea I came up with about a week ago. It’s insane because pulling it off requires meeting four conditions that are next to impossible to meet, and even then the most probable outcome would be the opposite of what I’m hoping for. But I can’t just sit here like this, so I have to at least try. If the first two of those conditions still won’t be met a week from now, I’ll get back to curling up in a ball and whimpering, adding yet another failure to the list, but I already spent a couple of days looking for things this week and plan to really do all I can next week.
Looking for things did involve some on-line searching, but that didn’t result in finding what I’m looking for, so I wandered around the city on Thursday and Friday and that’s the plan for next week as well. I’ll be going out again tomorrow and if that’ll just turn out to be another failure I’ll keep at it at least until Thursday, unless of course I’ll meet the first two conditions before then. The weekend, particularly at this time of year, seems like a very bad time to look for things, however, so I guess I’ll have to give up if I won’t have it by then…
I’ve had months to think of this, but it never even crossed my mind until about a week ago, and now it’s such a wrong time to be looking for things, both because everyone else is doing the same, so it’s very crowded, and because prices tend to increase, particularly for such things. Then again, it’s also perhaps more likely for something like this to be in stock and on display somewhere. So far that doesn’t seem to be the case, but what do I have left but hope?