Tropico 6 is unfortunately not fair game at the beginning. It positions you not just as the head of a small island nation, but on a political stage with powers far greater than yours. Your job is to hold your nation steady against the tides of foreign powers and the demands of the citizens you are responsible for. Tropico provides an interesting and lively playground for gamers interested in city simulators.
Your path to Tropico is a relatively simple one, given context and complexity by new systems that are progressively stacked on top of each other. Likewise, yours will be your new nation-state, just as our real-world economies are heavily impacted by trade, treaties, and demand.
Initially, you will have a lump sum to start your burgeoning economy with investments in infrastructure and business. Before you can have a primitive economy, you have several tasks to put together. Transportation and agriculture should be provided, food should be grown and delivered to people. Creating and transporting goods works largely the same regardless of what it is, but the complexity comes from putting metal or oil shipping skeletons on top of the systems that keep people fed and healthy. Ports and supply depots, roads and workers can only handle so much.
On their own, these mechanisms will work well enough.
Since this nation has been under dictatorship from the very beginning, you have control over pretty much everything. How much are government teams paid? Are the houses furnished? You let your people live in the hut? This comes down to another level, because as time passes, the population grows quite organically. Different factions come together on their own. Most of the time, you can support political movements that are in your own interests, but not always. Propaganda, trade, international political movements and even disasters will also have significant effects on the social structure.
This detail is not for its own sake; How you play is critically dependent on the political forces at work. Corruption is useful because it can be a cheap and fast way to consolidate power. But this exacerbates the underlying social issues. Still, because there's an element of role-playing - you create your own avatar, decorate your palace, and you even have a special bank account to squash cash - the mechanics are built to support a variety of options.
Hypothetically, you can push people to their limits and bail them out in the country, but dealing with the challenge of managing dynamic international political relations is far more satisfying - prevent invasion, keep your people healthy and happy, and lead the world in research. It's not the only viable path, but the rewards are largely self-evident and act like a scalable difficulty curve that you're encouraged to approach. Many trails are naturally beneficial for those who want to see their people's productivity or their nation's climb, but the transition to a lively, prismatic tourist hotspot can attract aesthetic marvels. The island can feel like dealing with dozens of Tamagotchi and feeling just as tangible satisfaction.
While still tapping into the series' endemic stylized humor, Tropico 6 is a little less resilient with its political parallels. Traces of colonialism have always been present, but they have not been treated so seriously in past records. For some far-distant kings, an apostle would at times ask for something absurd to accommodate their whims, and the joke was always disconnected from reality and did not know that the people - especially the colonists - lived in earnest. These threads are still here, but colonialism has hardly been resolved. Instead, the Queen's envoys were outspoken, stating that their exploits were unfair and rather cruel. But what will you do, fight a superpower? At the same time,
Beyond the increased simulation quality, the biggest change to Tropico 6 is the increased map complexity. Now you essentially have access to the entire archipelago to settle in. Not only do these often hold archaeological relics or rare minerals and explore on their own, they also present excellent mechanical challenges. Building a completely new parallel infrastructure isn't easy and requires forethought, planning and investment - but it's still very rewarding to do. The integration of new systems and even the creation of self-contained settlements are challenges rewarded with nuanced logistical challenges. While the basic simulation is indeed predictable, the island thrives a bit on its own: economies and policies change over time, giving your business a constant, low-level nudge.
Even without this new addition - citizens are born, live and eventually die, and the culture of your islands changes accordingly. How you balance and continue to balance politics and labor, exports and research will leave indelible marks on the psyche of the population. The complexity of these petri dish layers can be doubly overkill at times, especially if you have a fairly large or busy city and are new to the series. As the city expands and public opinion and needs change, tracking influential individuals or logistical breakpoints requires turning pages of a dozen or so different statistics and maps.
However, you have more than enough tools to control everything that happens in Tropico. Then failure and success can feel like a referendum, not just in your policies, but in El Presidente's interpretation. For girls, the concept of dictatorship as a role you play still exists, a hat if you want to wear it - although it's harder to indulge your own selfish impulses when you see how your actions have doomed Lydia's lumberjack life.
