Tropico 5 all-in-all

Overview

Complete guide of Tropico 5, Ill try to cover most of its factors and different things that i belive were unsaid.This will be based on things that i know from the game, and will contain exact information. I hope you will Enjoy 🙂

Intro: The game in a nutshell

Tropico 5 is a city building game that achieved balance between micro and macro Strategy, micro being more visible. In this game, you start off as the governor of an island building and trading past the colonial era through the world wars and the cold war to the amazing modern era.

The topics i’ll go through in this guide are, Finance, Needs, Tech, Political factions, World powers, and productivity.

Kick off: Colonial era and the start of the economy

So, you’ve started a new game. lets say you have 10k as your starting budget and 50 citizens.
pause the game and start thinking with what you want to kick off your economy, produce or other goods?

Food will be consumed by your population and the surplus will be exported. On the other hand the other goods are more profitable and will bring a bigger income.

So how do we will make money, and keep our people full? We will build the most profitable food building, which is the pig ranch (Pineapple,banana and cattle ranches are good too). But the ranches won’t stay long since they degrade the ground quickly (about 15% per-year which with one farm will take about 4-5 years to destroy itself of non productivity). I’d recommend building 5-7 ranches.

Now that we have instructed to build a food producing building we need to start thinking Efficiently. Let’s say we have 6 ranches, With one contraction office it’ll take some time to build them. So let’s build another one. One building of teamsters, is again, not enough, lets add one more.

One thing i’d like to suggest is raising the budget of the building to max, it’ll make people want to immigrate to your country and work there because you pay the people well. This will increase the amount you spend but at the end of the day it’s a great tool to attract immigrants

By now you probably have a minus in your bank account, don’t worry, it always starts like this. and go ahead and buy the silver treading licence (or platinum if you want) and fast forward.

While the buildings are being built, open the Overlay option and check for different options of other goods to produce, and search for mines.
Cotton and Coca Are your priority, and any mine is good.

Let’s say you payed off your debt and that you have 7k in the bank. Now its time to invest in more of a money making industry. if you don’t have the mining tech, go for either cotton, coca, or coffee. But before that, you should build a library and start researching The Shovel and The Sickle. From there on just research what you think is best.

Each plantation has its own upgrade, and you need to keep those in mind, some are good for the short term, some for the long term.

Build now as much as you want of what you want. Our next step is non-farming Industry. At this point it’s only logging (or mining if you researched it) so go ahead and put about 3-4 logging camps. The only industrial building available at this age is a plank factory, build one, and you should ok exporting logs and planks.

Mining, ok, its easy to guess what’s the most valuable metal, gold. but i’d recommend you mining only coal, iron and bauxite since gold can be used more effectively when you have a jewelry factory.

By now you will have a small industry going on the island. I’d recommend you building more Teamsters. why? Because about 16 teamsters wont have the time to collect a 6 month’s value of productions from your buildings. Try to add more of them and try always adding teamsters to your island to make it more fast.

Immigration is a big thing, and many open and high paying jobs are making people immigrate. But many people need many houses. By now I didn’t mention once this topic since it’s more of a last touch of this era. Depending on your budget, build as many country houses as you can, and try to separate them with one block on one of the sides, and on the empty block put a small garden. There are different types, just press “<” and “>”. The garden will increase the housing quality.

Once you built some (or many) houses you will now need a Catholic Mission. Why? because people are happier if there is more religion on the island. You should build about three of these so most of the people can go to church. Now we will need a grocery for food happiness which will help you become more beloved by your citizens.

By now you will have about 50% approval. And before advancing to the next era, we’ll need to delete those ranches that by now are not effective. after removing them, built this, a two way road to your dock. Now maybe it’ll seem a bit weird since there are no cars, but once there will be cars this area will be so populated that a two way road won’t be possible. just build a parallel road one block away from the original one.

Big tips before ending this part of the guide.

• Every time you have a quest take the longer mandate prize.
• There are different variables that control happiness, try to learn them by yourself 🙂
• Research what you feel is the most important.
• If you want to declare Independence by force, three guard towers and one fort will be enough.

Nuts!: World wars and the Industry

Congrats, you declared independence from the crown and now your farmer island can start to bloom. Now, instead of selling your raw goods to others to make use of them, in this age you can do it yourself. Your cattle herd will now gaze on great factories and your people will start making more money and will start showing you a piece of their mind, indeed a great time to be a dictator (well, dictator-ish).

Your industry now is separated into three groups, the luxury industry, the normal industry and the Power Industry.

As you can tell there are only 3 Industry buildings that are given to you upon reaching the world wars era. The thing is, that they are all very expensive, around the 20k each. So the best idea is probably to build them when you have enough money, and not going into deficit, since now people can (and will) tell you that they don’t like our country having a negative bank balance.

As i said in the first chapter, teamsters are very important, but sometimes they are not the bottleneck. If you see that your next profit from trading is, lets say 80K, but you ships take only 36K worth of cargo, in this case you should build a dock. I don’t think that building a dock unless you have this problem, is useful. Think of it this way, you have two docks, one will come in 4 months and will give 2000 while the other one will be in 1 month and will give 300. It’s better to have a one bigger payment than many little ones. But it’s up to you to decide what better for you.

Ok, Power talk now. Power is needed to fuel many later game industries, and some of the current industries. Power is also used to improve housing quality. Power comes from coal or gas at the cold war era, and since we are just in the world war era yet, coal is a big useful tool. Coal is also used to make steel, and steel is used to make cars in the cold war era, so coal is a big early game material, but weak late game since you can replace the power plants to use gas.

As i said at the start of the chapter, people can now show their disapproval via voting against you in the upcoming elections, so happiness becomes a big thing. ill try to explain each one and explain how to make it better.The right side of picture describes the main influence of a category, while not directly but a mean to represent. The crime safety for example, is influenced by the chart by number of police stations, but if build many police stations in one area that doesn’t cover the crime of the island it will be useless. but on the other hand housing is influenced directly by number of homeless people, there is also the factor of housing quality but ill explain later the influences.

Another new factor you need to care about in this era is other countries. In the Colonial era we had only the crown to care about, but now if we will side with one of the opposing parties, we will be attacked. We can, on the other hand keep good terms with both sides with embassies and with trade. This way, when we will end the era we will not need to fight, pay, of receive Nazi immigrants. Other plus on keeping on good terms with the factions of the world is that you will receive money once about a year from the faction (The US by default will send to you money, the axis needs good terms).

Back to talking about making money. This era presents us a great way of making money. Banks, will generate money according to our current funds. Another building that will help us is the customs house, mainly focused on Swiss bank account and import. The dray dock will also help you exporting more, since one of its upgrades makes the ships that export your goods more big hens capable carrying more. On more thing about the drydock, it comes with the compass tech, which gives you the ability to build anywhere you want, so no more scouting.

One thing that you probably noticed when you declared independence is your constitution. You have many different options, some are more democratic, other, well, less. But there is no complete truth about this area, declare what you seem fit, what is easier to you to control people with.

For now its the last part, if you are interested in more, comment and like this guide 🙂

— Hey this is the guide author. I’d like to thank anyone who wrote a comment and liked. Since I don’t play this game anymore and the fact that there is a newer Tropico game, this guide ends here. I’d like to thank especially the people who posted nice comments since this is was my first guide and back then (as noted by less nice comments) I couldn’t spell and would form awkward sentences. I corrected most of the spelling and re-wrote some sentences to be less awkward. Nonetheless thank you all so much and try to show support for people trying to be creative.
Flig.