Tropico 5

[calapine]

Release dates announced:

PC: 23. May 2014

Mac OS & X-Box 360: Summer 2014

PlayStation 4: Autum 2014

Linux (Steam OS): In Development

http://store.steampowered.com/app/245620/

The last part is interesting, release will be after Steam hardware is out. Year after year of "Year of Linux on the Desktop", and all it takes is a Valve announcement and things start to happen. 

[Lantyssa]

I imagine Steam has been a godsend to the Tropico franchise, so it makes sense for them to work on it.

[Sjofn]

Man I hope this is good. And that they remember when my Presidente is a goddamn fucking WOMAN. And that they either ditched Penultimo or at least give me the option to shoot him into the sun.

[Tannhauser]

I'm on board!  The series is fun, if a bit limited.  This new one looks quite ambitious and that's a good thing. 

[Morat20]

Xbox 360 and Playstation 4? Ouch.

[calapine]

Xbox 360 and Playstation 4? Ouch.

I was thinking the same, but then I looked it up and Tropico 4 is X-Box 360 too.

But yes, certainly had negative effects for the graphic engine and interface. 

[Chimpy]

The ouch might be because it is going to be on the newest Sony console but not the newest MS console.

[Morat20]

The ouch might be because it is going to be on the newest Sony console but not the newest MS console.

Yes.

[Paelos]

It's on PC which is all I care about.

[calapine]

Game is out. Player response for seems...mixed.

Only played for a few minutes so far (tutorial). My first impressions:

1) Too bright colours. Even accounting for the games over the top style it's just too extreme. Needs a filter or something.

2) Towns look sterile. Partly connected to the above. Everything looks quite sanitized. Low number of buildings in the first areas also is to blame for this. Example housing: During the colonization  times the residential options a) normal houses b) mansion. That's it.

3) Game speed options are gone. Well, almost: There is Normal and Fast. Normal seems to be about twice the speed of the slowest T4 setting, Fast something below the fastest T4 speed. Why they did this is a mystery to me.

4) La Presidenta:

[jakonovski]

I decided to try the tutorial and lost because I tried not cheating in elections. Then it just threw me back to the main menu and I have to go all the way back to the camera controls tutorial if I want the achievement.
What is going on with gaming these days ?

[calapine]

Ha, the same happened to me.

Little tip, you don't have to redo the tutorial: Winning the election is the end anyway. 

[Maledict]

elections actually matter now, and early on you don't want a liberal society. Let only the rich, religious vote.

Loving a lot of the changes, slightly vexed by a construction bug I had but so far seems like a very good game. Slightly pissed off by Eurogamers review critisciing it for not making enough changes, as once you start gettign under the hood there's a large number of differences compared to Tropioc 4 (and certainly more than the current coD, whichever we are up to now).

the eras alone really shifts things as it means you *have* to go through the raw resource phase, rather than leaping straight to advanced industry as you did in T4.

[jakonovski]

Ha, the same happened to me.

Little tip, you don't have to redo the tutorial: Winning the election is the end anyway. 

Yeah, I figured as much but it still didn't stop me from just quitting right there. I must be having some sort of a gaming burnout.

[calapine]

Some guy on RPGCodex:

For fuck's sake it has only...5 or 6 mission campaign, that doesn't reach modern times. You just build nuclear program and...game ends.
 Overall it's worse than tropico 4.
 Main reasons:
 - Tourism available only at modern times. Logical but not entertaining. No more special tourist buildings and ports - tourists arrive from your industrial port and go through all dirty streets and slums. Only hotels are available for tourist building.
 - Production is streamlined. You build the same factories time and time again. There's no reason to specialize.
 - No choices. There's no choice like tenement or apartment. You are given the option to upgrade tenements to apartments and then into skyscrapers.
 - Trade is worthless, just additional micromanagement to get a bit more profit.
 - Dumbed down(!!!) service buildings. I have no idea how could they do it but now you have only X/Y visitors for clinics, churches etc. No info how they work. Do they cover territory or count towards total population.
 - Pollution, religion and everything else are fucked. You can ignore everything. No more people appealing to you about isle problems - you can buy any demonstration or disperse it with military.
 - Rebels are a joke.
 - Population now no longer divided into lolyalists, communists etc, they are just amorphous mass with some sympathies.
 - Noone is pushing their demands.
 - Foreign relations also dumbed down.
 Etc et etc. The game could be described by just two words - "Dumbed down". Tropico 3 and 4 was not a complex game, but Kalypso managed to outdo themselves and create a shit out of potentially great economic simulator.

Maledict, as you seem the only one who has played this* more than a few minutes so far, is he right?

* I would, but feeling ill and dizzy. 

[Maledict]

No, not at all. Don't understand some of his points.

 - Tourism becomes active in the cold War, not Modern Times. That does mean if you are playing a sandbox game, you have to go through the colonial era (very fast) and the world war era first, but as a game balancing technique that's not a pain at all. Once you hit the Cold War you basically have to decide whether to do industry or tourism as that's when a lot of the special stuff hits. Again, if you want to play a tourism game just start in the Cold War era and you're basically playing an Enhanced Tropico 4...

- Production streamlined - not sure at *all* what this means. Their are more industries available, and there are now multiple chain industries (i.e. iron & coal --> steal, steel + bauxite --> cars). Same with fashion items, etc. Not sure at all what he means by specialisation - you build according to what you have. On the campaign maps I made a *fortune* by specialising in Jewelry as one of the maps as a ton of gold on it. Really have no idea what this complaint means.

- No choices - slightly true, maybe - if you ignore the fact that by the midpoint in Tropico 4 you replaced all your Tenements with apartments anyways. It's not really a choice if everyone does the same logical action?

- Trade is worthless? It's more detailed than in Tropico 4, and allows for more choices that link to your international standard, so this has added complexity and a chance to make extra cash.

- Service buildings - again, no idea what he's talking about. Service buildings work like they always did in Tropcio 4, only now you can actually see how many people are using them so know when to build more. The buildings are exactly the same as the last game...

- pollution / relgiion are fucked - total gibberish. You can now actually lose elections, and particulary religious unhappiness is a key component whereas in T4 I often ended up tanking the religious faction for most of the game.

- rebels - harder than the previous game, they do actually destroy things now.

- Population is divided into factions, and by modern times there are 8 of them. Exactly like T4.


In short summary, the bullet points are an absolute load of complete and utter shite. It's been written by someone who didn't seem to understand some of the points of T4, and who played T5 for maybe a couple of minutes. I'm finding T5 harder than T4, and thanks to the changes it does actually make going all dictator actually beneficial (whereas in T4 the standard strat was to develop an island paradise all the time). It also feels (apologies) like the guy is flat out lying on some of his points as they simply are not true - for example, the campaign does have modern time missions and continues after the mission where you build a nuclear program.


 

[tmp]

I've skipped Tropico 4 after playing 3 so I don't have comparison with the direct prequel, but I'm enjoying this one a lot so far. The only (minor) complaint would be, it seems all family members are of the same gender matching what you select at the start, though maybe it's just RNG screwing me over. That, and not many customization options for them which aren't downright silly, but I guess it doesn't matter all that much when I rarely ever watch my guys milling about.

[calapine]

I've skipped Tropico 4 after playing 3 so I don't have comparison with the direct prequel, but I'm enjoying this one a lot so far. The only (minor) complaint would be, it seems all family members are of the same gender matching what you select at the start, though maybe it's just RNG screwing me over. That, and not many customization options for them which aren't downright silly, but I guess it doesn't matter all that much when I rarely ever watch my guys milling about.

Must be RNG. My Presidenta's heir was Christo Capet.

[tmp]

Ahh, excellent.

[Tannhauser]

Argh, I must get this.  Love the Tropico series.

[Paelos]

I tried to play it but it broke my computer again. So now I'm in tech support hell trying to figure out how to fix it.

I may just load up my older machine and see if it will run things after I send this POS back to get fixed.

[Miasma]

Does it make you login to that shitty ubisoft uplay system?

[Paelos]

It makes you log in to an account, but that's it. I've been able to play T4 off line before.

[tmp]

You can skip the account login too and just go straight to playing, I do since couldn't be arsed to make one.

[Ingmar]

Be warned that for some reason, this game seems to *require* a DX11 capable card. So if your PC is a little older, you may not be able to run this. Which seems pretty stupid for a genre that doesn't typically push technical boundaries.

[calapine]

Be warned that for some reason, this game seems to *require* a DX11 capable card. So if your PC is a little older, you may not be able to run this. Which seems pretty stupid for a genre that doesn't typically push technical boundaries.

For AMD user support begins at the Radeon HD 4000 series, which is DirectX 10.1. Maybe they are using Shader Model 4.1

Can't really say I am getting upset about this, DX 11 is 4 1/2 years old, at one point you have to make a cutoff.

Edit: Actually from a tech POV it's one of the first games I have seen that can take advantage of 8 cores. Not bad for a plucky dev studio from Bulgaria.

[Paelos]

Okay now that the computer is fixed I've been playing this. There are two game-breaking things I've noticed.

One, teamsters don't seem to work well. At one point, they were all getting stuck in the docks and other buildings. They say they've fixed this but I remain skeptical given that they don't seem to pick things up fast enough from industry buildings. I have thousands of items sitting on output loading waiting to be picked up, but they only seem to grab 1000 at a time. This is infuriating since it stagnates the entire economy, and it didn't work that way in Tropico 4 at all.

Two, there's poor immigration control base only on the constitution as far as I can tell. Even with a guarded option, people just keep showing up. It seems unstoppable, and it will eventually cripple your island. If you don't make houses you get thrown out. If you make houses, you get more immigrants which means you have to multiply your resources and jobs. In Tropico 4 there were easy options to control the flow of people showing up. In this game,

[Teleku]

One, teamsters don't seem to work well. At one point, they were all getting stuck in the docks and other buildings. They say they've fixed this but I remain skeptical given that they don't seem to pick things up fast enough from industry buildings. I have thousands of items sitting on output loading waiting to be picked up, but they only seem to grab 1000 at a time. This is infuriating since it stagnates the entire economy, and it didn't work that way in Tropico 4 at all.

Sounds pretty accurate to me.   

[Ginaz]

One, teamsters don't seem to work well. At one point, they were all getting stuck in the docks and other buildings. They say they've fixed this but I remain skeptical given that they don't seem to pick things up fast enough from industry buildings. I have thousands of items sitting on output loading waiting to be picked up, but they only seem to grab 1000 at a time. This is infuriating since it stagnates the entire economy, and it didn't work that way in Tropico 4 at all.

Sounds pretty accurate to me.   

Ah Teamsters, so surly and lazy.

[Paelos]

Best part of Tropico 5? The soundtrack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGvhrI42mIE

Also this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRUj6M0tpLo

And this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4kcSKpwUyI

This one too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuJq9VLOe2g

So many good ones! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt3u33v_aoI

[lamaros]

Now banned in Thailand!

[Count Nerfedalot]

Wow, it really is! LOL  Boy, talk about living up (down) to all the caricatures you take offense to. Are those sunglassed generals taking lessons from North Korea now?