Kyzer's Guide to Colonial Era

Tropico 6★ 4 · 74 ratings6.8k views140 favorites4 min readby KyzerUpdated 11 Nov, 2020View on Steam ↗

Before anything, the checklist.

The first things to do when you start:

Check the starting plantation / ranch (depends on the map). If the efficiency is over 85% (within reason), leave it alone. If not, just destroy it. You really don't want any farms under 80%.
Set your Teamster's Office to max budget and Loose Load Limits. Teamsters are expensive, and you need everything to move in order to make money. Build one Teamster's Office for about every 4-5 buildings that need stuff to be moved around, and place them close to what they're supposed to be moving. They have to travel from the Teamster's Office to the building they're going to every time they start working.
It's always a good move to increase the budget a bit on Construction Offices.
If you start with a low population (under 150), max out the budget for the Dockyard. The more ships that come in, the more immigrants you get, and it doesn't cost you that much (at least without Advanced Boat Services).
If you're on 'Captain Blackbeard' pirate difficulty, build at least two Forts in positions where they can possibly use 'Man the Ramparts' mode. 'Man the Ramparts' significantly increases their survivability and damage.

Your core economy

Your primary sources of income are:

Highest efficiency Plantations [NOT from budget] (huge potential income)
Planks (large income)
Rents (sustained income)
Coconuts (huge potential income)
Rum (large potential income)

Your secondary sources of income

'Rare' materials like Wool, Leather, Rubber, and Coffee, and minerals (medium-to-large income depending)
Ranches in general (small-medium income)

Your priorities

You want to prioritize in this order (not relevant to initial budget):

Logging Camps (4 is a good number per Lumberyard, but you can work with 2).
Lumber Yard near / centralized to the Logging Camps to minimize hauling time.
Teamster's Offices (2-3)
A handful (1-3) of Coconut Harvesters, build more later if you can. You want about a full Plantation's-length between them.
High efficiency Corn, Banana, Pineapple, Tobacco, and Coffee Plantations (and/or Rubber and Cotton).
Pirate Cove (sometimes the Smugglers give you great deals, plus a landmark).
If possible, 3-4 Sugar Plantations with 90%+ efficiency and a Rum Distillery.

Colonial landmark

Colonial landmarks are subject to debate and your playstyle, however, here's a brief tier-list:

Best: Hagia Sophia
While it may seem inferior to the other choices initially, spending long periods of time in the Colonial Era can drain your population a lot, since there is no real health-care. It also helps in later eras, as health-care is expensive and has long wait-times, and sometimes citizens can die on their way to their health-care service. It's the best one to use in all situations, and only interferes with the Taj Mahal.
Because you can make massive amounts of money in Colonial Era easily with a proper economy, staying in Colonial as long as possible helps significantly with your ease into World Wars.
Second best: Stonehenge
Stonehenge is very good and helps a lot with tourism by reducing pollution, as well as increasing the fertility of land, as it seems to also counteract the 'fertility suction' of Ranches and Plantations. The trees around it are effectively worthless, however.
Gameplan Dependent: Brandenburg Gate
Arguably the prettiest landmark of this era, it depends on how you plan on playing and if you want to change politics en-masse and enforce a specific political party.
Overrated and Arguably Worst: Registan of Samarkand
Giving all citizens a high-school education automatically is seemingly the best on paper, however, it causes massive problems when you don't have excessive population to fill the Uneducated jobs. New players and old alike who don't understand the potential dangers of having too many educated citizens will often find themselves in Game-Over without knowing why. Your main income comes from uneducated jobs until very late game, and this landmark can really F@#% you over. There's a reason why it's the easiest to get.

Transition into World Wars

A tough transition, which needs planning.

You want to have a at least $20,000 to spend on new required buildings such as Healthcare (even with Hagia Sophia -- health-care still affects happiness and rebellion) and Education (High-school, College) and Faith.
You want to have more than enough population to fill new jobs from the new industrial buildings.
Plans to defend yourself from the World Powers.
Plans to expand your economy to support increased spending from necessities of this era.

Noob traps / tips

The following are noob traps to watch out for:

Too many Taverns, too many drunks
Splurge money on the Circus. It's better in most cases, especially because you wont have slow drunks walking around all the time, and the Crime increase from Taverns.
Toy Workshop
I still can't tell if this building is competitive with the Lumber Yard. It seems to make more immediate cash, but you can't refine them further into even more money.
If you start to go in debt all of a sudden after building more resource production or industry, immediately max your dockyard budget to get your population back to work those jobs. You may even need to fire your Palace Guard.
More Guards
is not necessary in most cases, unless you have rebellion issues further along in the eras.
People don't want to work bad jobs like Fishing, Coconut Harvesting, and Mining because they make less money and have poor Job Quality. Keep that unemployment right on the edge to avoid not having income from these great money makers.