Return to Island Domination

I’ve been playing Tropico again.

For those of you who may not remember, Tropico is like SimCity, except you’re on an island and you are not a paltry mayor, you are El Presidente, so everyone must bow to your omniscient view from the sky. You also start the game with a palace.

First off, Jon figured out how I could play the game in Parallels on my MacBook. My mac is all for world domination, but sometimes the island music gets to it, so it prefers not to run Tropico directly.

Then, I opened up the game, set up my dossier to scale things towards total success in farming (I NEED my goat farms) and began my regime.

59 years into it, I was voted off the island.

See, generally you get a nice note every decade or so, reminding you to hold a free election. I must have picked a dossier that turned this feature off, or else the game has changed and you no longer get these reminders.

Apparently, not holding elections for 59 years has a slightly negative impact on your people’s feeling of liberty.

I figure, it’s good to find these things out in a virtual setting, before actually trying it on, say, France, and losing all the time and resources it took to conquer.

So, tonight I started a new island, this one concentrating on mining and building churches. (You have to build a lot of churches, or people get angry.)

I had another one going, but it was based on tourism, and all the tourist avatars are so fat and sassy that you just want to encourage the natives to eat them.

Unfortunately, there is no “Eat the Tourists” edict. Also, while that would probably raise your local population’s food-related happiness, it might strain your relationships with the US and Russia.

In any case, if you’ve never tried this game, I recommend it. Everyone should get the experience of watching teeny virtual papaya plants grow, and also the sheer awesomeness of building 10 construction offices and watching 50 little workers go to town on your apartment complex.

More on the new version of Tropico here.

Image credit: tropico and goat, cathedral & tourists.