A painful disappointment

I loved the concept of the first Tropico and its expansion pack, but this had the promise of blowing almost anything else out of the water. Boy, was I in for a disappointment.

Even though the game is focused on pirates, there is no pirating going on - that you have anything to do with, at least. No, you're stuck building and managing a perpetually understaffed city while sending out boats on painfully vague missions that you have no control over. In other words, don't think of this as a pirating game, think city sim with a pirate gimmick thrown in.

Now, the good news: the graphics are good and the music is excellent. You can zoom in to the point where you have absolutely no use for it, but it sure is nice to know that your underlings are nicely details where they scurry about. In the off-chance you get tired of the music, you can buy additional CDs and pop in while playing - the game package even come with rebate coupons for them.

The city sim is pretty much what you would expect. You have
your production facilities, farms, bars, houses and other city components. You have two categories of people on your island, pirates and prisoners. Pirates thrive on anarchy, prisoners need fear to stay timid. Unfortunately, the two clashes so you have to finely tune the amount of "anarchy-raising" objects to "fear-raising" objects in any given area (silly as it may seem, you have a neat assortment of clearly marked objects you can sprinkle about).

You have to keep everything connected by using roads so that transports run smoothly between buildings. The pirating part, as mentioned earlier, consists of sending your boat(s) out to either seek random confrontations or raid a settlement. Aside from deciding on a general area to hit, that's it - all you can do is send them on their way and hope for the best. Not very thrilling, but workable if the rest of the game is entertaining. Now, the problem: you have practically no control over who does what, or what production is prioritized. I'll explain using just ONE example: you need cannons for your boats or they're sitting ducks.

In order to produce a single cannon you need a chain of production facilities in place that provide wood (wood cutter camp, sawmill) and iron (mine, ore processing facility). You also need a number of workers, skilled and otherwise, in place at each of the preceding facilities for the process to take place, plus one delivery guy at each place. In addition, you also need enough people working the fields so that there's enough grub to feed all the these people.

Now, the bad news: once you've built all these buildings and assigned all these people to their respective tasks, there's nobody left to man the construction tent that will build the cannon foundry. But, the tutorial teaches us, you can cleverly remedy this by upping the salary for the construction tent, which will cause workers to scurry there ... Unfortunately, leaving their old jobs at the sawmill and the mine, bringing that production to a halt. Once the cannon foundry is built, you demolish the construction tent, and the workers should go back to the mine, right? Wrong. They go to work at the cannon foundry, which lacks raw material, and there is no force on earth that can make them stop their thumb-twiddling and go back to doing something productive. To remedy this you send out a pirate ship to capture prisoners, the only known way to grow your workforce, but since their ship has no cannons it was instantly sunk by a British pirate-hunter. Are we having fun yet? But hey, now you have no boat, so you don't need any cannons anymore. :-)

The bottom line is that the whole game is a black hole of catch-22s and frustration because of the total and absolute lack of control over individual workers. If you could at least assign them where you please, so that you could have at least a skeleton crew manning all facilities, you'd have a fighting chance to get anything done. As it is now, your only way to assign work is pumping up salaries, but that tool is so dull it makes a baby spoon seem sharp by comparison.

I could go on and rant about this lack of control over raw materials, how equipment get automatically distributed (why the heck do the idiot workers keep stockpiling guns in one end of the island instead of sending them to the ship that has none???) and a gazillion other annoying quirks, but I'll summarize it like this: Tropico 2 is a huge let-down, and you should avoid it at all costs. I really wanted to like this game, but no such luck. Get Civilization III or Rise of Nations instead.