This got me most of the way there, but it still wasn’t quite enough. Naturally, I did this mass eviction just after an election – people forget if you give them enough time. Productivity went up dramatically, especially with the teamsters. Once I unfreeze the game, everybody looks for a new home and many, though not all, choose a home near their job. What I did instead was to wait until I had a fair amount of lodgings where I needed them, then freeze the game and very quickly evict everybody on the island (except the soldiers, who tend to be temperamental). Sure, I could track down each worker in the job sites and find out where he lives and decide whether or not to evict him, so he will move closer, but that would have taken hours to have an effect. Problem was, people just don’t want to move. Yes, anybody who has played the game more than a few hours would have thought of that and I tried many variations on housing. The solution I found for this was, of course, to build tenements and apartments near the new job sites. Product would just build up at every mine and lumber camp and, despite a large number of teamsters offices built and workers hired, nobody came to get it. The construction workers and the teamsters (required to move the product to the docks for sale) were even worse about this. After a short stint at the job, off home they would go, not to return (in game terms) for years. After taking years to build mines and logging camps, they become unproductive, because most of the workers still live in the village or at the top of the hill. The most difficult things to accomplish are the goals in lumber and mining, because they are farthest from the original village. The biggest problem was the distance involved. Today, I finally made it work.įor anybody looking for a solution to this nightmare, here are the discoveries and strategies I found: This past week, I took it up yet again and started having some success. I would repeatedly lose this scenario, giving up after a time, only to take it up again a year or two later.
The hardest one I have come across is Mt Sucio, in which a volcano has spewed mud over large chunks of the island, mostly destroying the economy, and El Presidente’ is given fifty years in which to generate large profits in not one but five sectors. It is all done with a lot of humor and the game has many scenarios, some more challenging than others. Oh, he can also make a few edicts and have people arrested, but he needs to avoid coups, rebellions, and being voted out of office. All the player-president gets to do is spend the money, when there is any, and decide what gets built and when. The citizens of Tropico are autonomous and live their lives the way they want – get married, have babies, change jobs, go to school – without any real direction from the president. One of my favorite time-wasters is Tropico, a 2001 computer game from Pop Top, where the player takes the role of El Presidente’ on a small Caribbean island.