Tropico 5 Dictate Through the Ages

Your reign stretches across four eras: colonial times, the World Wars and the Great Depression, the Cold War, and modern times and beyond. Each era brings its own challenges and its own buildings, over 100 per era, all drawn in a fresh, colorful art style. You start as a governor answering to the Crown and work your way toward a nation that answers to no one. Time moves on whether your economy is ready or not, so every era asks you to rebuild, renovate and rethink the island you thought you had figured out.

Your extended family lives on the island, and every member can be appointed as ruler, manager, ambassador or general. Invest in them to unlock new traits, and the relatives who once seemed like decoration become your most valuable assets. It pays to think of your reign as a family business: the right cousin managing the right plantations, a loyal general holding the army, an ambassador smoothing things over abroad. When one ruler's term ends, the dynasty carries on, and so does your plan.

The island starts hidden: beyond the fog of war lie valuable resource deposits and the ruins of ancient civilizations, waiting to be found. From there it's classic city building with a tropical accent. Lay out roads, place plantations and houses, keep housing, food and jobs ahead of a growing population, and discover new buildings, technologies and resources through research. Old buildings can be renovated into more efficient modern ones, so the town you founded in colonial times can grow into something your first governor wouldn't recognize.

Tropico 5 is a management sim where the business is an entire country. You build an export economy, amass a global trade fleet, and send your ships to secure trade routes with neighboring islands or world superpowers, for imports as well as exports. Citizens have opinions about wages, housing and religion, and political factions keep score of everything you do. Fair warning: the economy can be punishing, and debt spirals catch even careful rulers. Balancing the budget against a demanding populace is the real game, and it doesn't always go your way.

For the first time in the series, up to 4 players can build their own cities and economies on the same island map. You can play cooperatively, sharing resources, supplies and population while your islands grow side by side, or you can declare war on each other and find out whose economy was actually ready. Either way, watching someone else's half of the island flourish (or collapse) next to yours gives the usual dictator routine a whole new flavor.