Tropico 5: El Presidente Is Eternal

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Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Baronjutter posted:

I hope they give some good advantage to siding with the axis in WWII. We of course know Germany will lose and the US will emerge supreme, and a tiny little axis-aligned island off the coast of Florida would not see its self in the US's good books. So what possible reason would a player have for siding with the axis? Or perhaps between ages all bets are off and the slate is wiped clean. It's not like the US wouldn't forgive and forget literal nazi's if it means advantage against the Soviets.

And do we know what the situation will be like in modern times? No sides, just various countries with no either/or alliances?

Thing is, Tropico is a tiny little insignificant island. Sure, you might not be in the US's good graces in some ways, but in other ways, they really don't give a poo poo. It's not like you were directly attacking them; you're just supplying a very small amount of material in the form of trade goods.

# ¿ May 21, 2014 03:38

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 14:36

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Ether Frenzy posted:

Well, no midnight release means that I'm going to send my team home at 2:30 tomorrow and pretend it's for the holiday weekend. El Presidente is a benevolent and glorious leader.

So I guess everybody wins, except for those of us who thought digital distribution would revolutionize impulse buying. Curse you waiting for things, curse you

Ordinarly I'd get to go home early, but my boss specifically asked me to schedule a later meeting. Oh well, at least it'll give time for the game to download, right?

# ¿ May 23, 2014 02:51

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Baronjutter posted:

"too difficult to fail"

gently caress, that's the ONE thing I wanted.

\/ I was really hoping for difficulty sliders that made the game borderline impossible. Where simply surviving to the modern age would be a serious achievement.

There's a youtube channel linked earlier where a dude is doing a playthrough on the hardest difficulty. It does not seem impossible by any stretch of the imagination, but money is harder to come by, his people are more restless, and foreign factions are much more difficult to keep happy (there's a point where he almost gets invaded by the Axis, and has to immediately put down embassies and praise them before the situation gets too out of hand). I feel like there's a lot of ways to toe the line and flirt with failure for big rewards. It also looks like it's easier to be a complete totalitarian rear end in a top hat and win by oppressing your people into the ground.

I don't know, to me it looks like the game will be pretty damned amazing.

# ¿ May 23, 2014 06:50

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

IAmTheRad posted:

The one thing the reviews haven't touched on at all is the multiplayer aspect, probably because the servers weren't up. I do wonder how that will work, but I'm sure you goons will be able to tell us all about it. They're selling the eras thing, but I'm just more curious about how the multiplayer works. Do you work with each other, or do you try to screw each other over, and how do you "win" a match, by taking out the other El Presidentes?

Press builds don't get the multiplayer I guess. Or people just wanted to see how the game played compared to Tropico 4 without getting other people in the way or something.

From the brief preview stuff I saw, it looks like sandbox missions have victory conditions like "points," money, or one or two other things. Presumably points are achieved via doing things during the game, like exporting goods first, achieving happiness, etc. I doubt it's just killing the other presidentes, or it'd be a really boring RTS.

# ¿ May 23, 2014 11:05

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Mokinokaro posted:

TotalBiscuit's video showed that you can set up different goals for sandbox games. There are research victories in addition to the points and money (which iirc is swiss bank account money.)

I assume all of this applies to multiplayer games as well, which is why I brought it up - it'd give a bit more dimension to games.

# ¿ May 23, 2014 11:32

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

So cheapskate is a thing again. -% building costs are amazing and I will always get as many of them as humanly possible. Is it possible to get multiple cheapskates in the same dynasty? If so, that would be absurd.

# ¿ May 24, 2014 06:44

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Rhonyn Peacemaker posted:

I'm glad someone said that. I wish I had known. Fuckers are getting iced now.

I will be killing them in the streets. Setting an example. El presidente has a problem when you steal from the state (my pockets).

Of course, the problem with that is that it massively increases unrest, which as I found out recently, is a real pain in the rear end. I have no idea how to decrease unrest, so I was forced to run democracy so that people wouldn't rebel in the streets. On the other hand, my approval rating is at 80%, so I'm really not sure why the unrest is still so high.

# ¿ May 26, 2014 19:07

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

FrozenVent posted:

If you haven't had an uprising yet, you should. It's hilarious.

Also your game is pretty much hosed, hope you had a decent save.

Yeah, I had an uprising once, and lost. I then reloaded, swapped to democracy, and built eight more army bases just on the off chance that an uprising still manages to happen.

I think all the unrest happened from banishing a shitload of crime lords. Also, I have yet to discover a single rebel, despite having police coverage everywhere and running constitution options that increase discovery rate. I'm guessing that's a good thing.

Is there a quick way to view all special people at once instead of having to hunt for those little red bowler caps manually?

# ¿ May 26, 2014 19:17

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Alberto Basalm posted:

I saw a crime-lord walking around the police station so I investigated. Maybe he got arrested, I think. He's a cop. A crime lord who is a cop...it struck me as so genius I still haven't killed him.

edit: also how do I make new dynasty members

You get side missions for new dynasty members, and in theory you get sidequests for existing dynasty members, but I have no idea if that actually makes them any better at what they do.

# ¿ May 26, 2014 20:24

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

So I just figured out why you would use the Constitution option where only male citizens vote. Some buildings/options/managers convert small numbers of voters to vote for El Presidente. By cutting the voting pool in half, those votes count for a hell of a lot more.

Granted, at that point you should probably be running the option for only the wealthy to vote, but I guess male citizens voting is for those times when you're also bleeding the wealthy for every penny they have (or if somehow you make your entire island wealthy, like if you're running a tycoon).

# ¿ May 26, 2014 22:10

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Poil posted:

Is there a point in tourism? The buildings are even more expensive than factories and nowhere near as profitable. Every tourist type has a smaller and a larger hotel building with the smaller barely making any money.

Tourism makes pretty good cash with a lot less pollution, which is nice. It also tends to be less boom/bust than industry, since you're not dependent on exporting material from docks. Keep in mind that you can and should make tourist-only entertainment buildings in addition to your hotels, as those make tons of money off of tourists. My only complaint about tourism is that they seem to use the same docks as your industry, when I would prefer to have them shuttled to a corner of my island with less pollution and ugly buildings.

Honestly, it's a good side revenue booster, can be contained in one location of the island, and is a good way to employ uneducated workers.

In an unrelated note, I love the campaign storyline. [Major campaign spoilers] I haven't actually started the missions after you go back in time, but after being sabotaged by Isla Rojo and Puerto Coco throughout the game, it's brilliant that we're the ones responsible for sabotaging ourselves!

# ¿ May 26, 2014 23:07

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Alkydere posted:

Gah. Need more highschool graduates! You can't ever have enough highschool grads once you get to the Modern era.

I have 4 running now, all working at 275-300% efficiency and I STILL don't have enough highschool educated Tropicans, especially now that I have hydro-farms.

Yeah, you have to upgrade that stuff slowly or your economy will stall out. It's hilarious just how many more education matters in the Modern Era. I really wish there were an intermediate state between the colonial plantation and the modern hydroponics farms though; it seems a bit silly to have to wait that long just to upgrade my agricultural output. Also, is the tobacco farm upgrade worth it at all (the one that depletes soil quality massively in return for boosted efficiency)? I haven't tried it yet, but if the efficiency hit from losing the soil quality is less than the gain, then it might be worth it?

# ¿ May 27, 2014 01:32

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Good lord I hate rebels. I had them destroy my steel mill which was literally about five blocks away from five army bases. Incidentally, I also had two rebel squads fend off three tank squads when the rebels had 60 attack and my tanks had something like 150.

Also, I really wish they'd make trade ships just clip through each other instead of slowing down. I get the effect they were going for, but I've got a gridlock of about fifty ships in front of my city and it's a bit of an eyesore.

# ¿ May 28, 2014 16:25

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

nutranurse posted:

Spread out your docks all around the island, dude. Don't make one mega city, you've got a whole tropical island you can populate and then oppress.

I would, but I wanted more trade ships. As it stands, I've used up around 75% of the beach.

Regardless, the big problem with the clipping is that ships will slow down, but they'll never speed back up again. I've had isolated ships proceed along at a crawl even with nothing interfering with their movement. Then, of course, new ships run into the old buggy slow ships and slow down themselves, so the cycle just perpetuates itself. It doesn't even prevent clipping; there are so many ships that they all are clipping into each other and it's a bigger problem than it would be if they just never slowed down in the first place.

It also doesn't help that all my docks (and all my buildings that aren't houses for that matter) are at maximum budget with a maxed out tycoon leader, so ships are arriving every 3 months or so and trade ships are arriving every month (if they could, at least, most of them are tied up in gridlock).

I do need to learn to spread out more though. I tend to max out my population while using around 33% of the island. I think that's primarily because I tend to build a lot of my basic infrastructure in the colonial and early world wars era, so the limited access to cars means that I need to build a bit more compactly.

Interesting note: my dynasty has two generals in it since one of them was obtained through an event that gave me a general specifically. I wonder if I can double up on tycoons or cheapskates. I think the best dynasty possible would be a dynasty full of tycoons or cheapskates. Full cheapskates would be something like a 50% discount on every building, while full tycoons would be around +40% effectiveness to all buildings with max budget on top of having 6 maxed out tycoon managers for important facilities.

# ¿ May 28, 2014 16:51

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

John Charity Spring posted:

I've seen some 3-star generic managers too but I've no idea what got them to that point.

Out of curiosity, did you run a census?

# ¿ May 29, 2014 10:14

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

DreadLlama posted:

How do you get rid of lots of people at once? The "religious" faction is refusing to vote for me and they need to be eliminated. But there do not appear to be any options for "emigration = mandatory if faction = x." I know I can go through the faction list one by one and issue a "kill" order but that's tedious, slow, and expensive. Not to mention, they always seem to come back. Is there any solution to deal with them in a permanent and final way?

Discredit the leader, run a smear campaign, and run policies that encourage other factions, like social engineering. You don't necessarily have access to all of this until later on though.

# ¿ May 30, 2014 16:53

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Speedball posted:

They don't have prisons? Then what do you do with crime? (Do people turn into Professional Criminals as a job in Trop 5?)

They become Crime Lords and those have to be discovered by police. About the only thing you can do to them is banish them from tropico, which confiscates their assets into your swiss bank account, and pisses people off, which ups your revolt risk. As far as I know, there's no way to lower revolt risk, and the only way to deal with it is to swap to democracy to prevent uprisings.

The same is true for rebels, sadly. It's silly that we have the tools to find these people, but then we have no tools to do anything to them. It's a real missed opportunity for what could have been such a neat system.

# ¿ May 30, 2014 19:40

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Zigmidge posted:

You just said you had the tools. Just because the tools don't work like you want them to doesn't mean they're absent.

For the record this makes perfect sense, in what universe would a state leader acting as judiciary not piss everyone off?

So why can't I set up a judiciary? I have tools, yes, but they force me into running democracy, so I can't even really try playing as a horribly oppressive dictator who flagrantly ignores elections and cheats.

The tools for dealing with special citizens are just lacking all around, really. Why can't I imprison rebels? Hell, it'd be nice to have options where after imprisoning them you could treat them well for less unrest, use hard labor to piss people off but maybe reduce the risk of people rebelling, or interrogate rebels to reveal other rebels.

Even just giving tools to reduce uprising chances would help immensely. Bribing people, passing edicts, keeping high happiness, firing/framing/executing scapegoats, etc.

# ¿ May 30, 2014 19:59

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

toasterwarrior posted:

Noticed this too. Apparently there's a description somewhere that says it'll deplete the land around it as the years pass, which sucks. I hope Factory Farms don't do that, because Cattle is a nice boost to food variety and is a handy source of employment for the proletariat.

If you bulldoze a ranch, the quality recovers pretty rapidly. I wonder if the same thing happens with cutting employment to zero for a bit, or if a steady state can be achieved by limiting the number of workers.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2014 12:24

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Decrepus posted:

I'm not really interested in the campaign and enjoy the sandbox a lot (although I haven't been playing much). Can I still grow a dynasty and rank up in a long sandbox game or no?

Yes, dynasties are separate between sandbox and campaign.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2014 05:06

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

Vectorwulf posted:

Rename this to something like ShipSpeed.lua (or whatever you'd like), and drop it in ...\Tropico 5\CommonLua

OnMsg.ClassesPreprocess = function()
TradeShip.critical_dist = 1
TradeShip.max_wait_collision_time = 100
TradeShip.radius = 1
TradeShip.slow_down_factor = 100
TradeShip.slow_down_perc = 500
TradeShip.full_speed = 45000
SteamShip.full_speed = 45000
SteamShip.accel = 10000
SteamShip.critical_dist = 1
SteamShip.max_wait_collision_time = 100
SteamShip.radius = 1
end

The "Full_speed" value is currently making them warp in, so feel free to tweak that down as much as you'd like. I believe the Radius makes them small enough to slide by other ships, and the wait_collision_time modifier makes them re-adjust very quickly if they do run into another craft.

Can't test this right now, but if this does the trick, you are an awesome person. The ship collision stuff is really irritating, especially when you end up with a logjam that has ships from three different eras in it because there's a point where some ships come to a dead stop and never move at all.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2014 17:19

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 14:36

Dirk the Average: Feb 7, 2012; "This may have been a mistake."

FractalSandwich posted:

It's not mentioned in the patch notes, so I need to test it more, but it looks like they might have fixed the issue with your imports immediately getting exported again.

Of course, sometimes in the Colonial era you can buy things from pirates for less than the export cost, at which point you want them to be exported immediately through legitimate channels.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2014 07:20

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