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Tropico 2: Pirate Cove Feature Feature
Stephen Leyton
27/01/2003
”Pieces of eight, pieces of eight.” “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.” “Land ahoy!” Yes, it’s a game about pirates.
Actually, itâs a sequel but with plenty of differences. Tropico received a good deal of critical acclaim on its release. Based on solid ideas, it was fleshed out with plush graphics and a certain amount of originality. With the sequel due in April 2003, TVG met up with US Game's Designer, Bill Spieth, from developer Frog City, responsible for Tropico2: Pirate Cove (T2: PC), to find out more.
Poptop, which is owned by Take2Games, produced and developed Tropico but this time around there is a completely new development team working on the sequel. After two years on the original title it was merely a case of not wanting to work on the sequel so presented with a new concept, with many similarities to the original game, Frog City was selected to move the Tropico brand forward.
Bill was eager to concisely give the low down on what made T2: PC different from the original title. "Basically both are 'builder games', where the main way you work on your environment, improve you status, is by building. That in turn encourages your people to do things, rather than selecting and directing them, you construct things and they react. Your success is gauged on how well you meet their needs whilst satisfying them. In that way both games are the same. In Tropico, when you built up an economy, as a Caribbean dictator, you were building it up primarily to sell products - whether it was rum, corn or whatever, whilst earning money with your exports. T2: PC does a 'kind of' reverse on that. The player maintains their wealth not by production of materials, but by plundering merchants on the high seas and bringing the victims back to the island as captive workers. In addition, the pirate characters show a great deal of individual personality, so that the player has a vested interest in the characters' well being.
Constructions on the island are mostly built to supply your pirate's ships or to make your pirates happy, so they can go out to steal and pillage â“ a reverse from the Tropico economy.
"In the original game your people were your citizens - in T2: PC there are two classes of people and there are ways to turn one class into the other. Looking at your island there you will find pirates and captives and you will treat them very differently. The pirates, your allies, plunder
bringing back gold and are evil like you. The captives work for you and are captured /kidnapped by your pirates. You will want to keep them resigned to being your captives. The more afraid they are, the more they will work for you. You must also be aware that they could try to escape, so you must understand your captive policy and how well you are faring and what your pirate policy is - and how you are doing." You could try to strike a balance but pirates, and hence you, the player, are a nasty bunch so itâll be very hard to be nice. âAlthough the period was an historically bloodthirsty time, we have deliberately kept the violence down to a minimum. Your captives will obviously try to make an occasional run for it, only to be pursued by one of your pirates. You will have no control over what happens, merely being able to view the, almost inevitable, outcome. And your captive wonât be going back to work!â One way of keeping your captives in check, apart from bunging them in a stockade, is to place effigies at strategic points to scare them into behaving.â
There is not a 50 - 50 mix between the two factions, this depends on what kind of strategy you are playing. You could easily end up with a large percentage of pirates but this will differ greatly depending on your style of play - there are no real ways to play the game in terms of numbers.
In T2: PC you have more control over a specific goal, whereas in Tropico, you had a variety of different things to do and play and they did not have as much depth. Tropico also had limitations in the way you controlled tasks. Being a military leader was a good example of this. In T2: PC, being a pirate gives a great deal of depth to different ways of playing the pirate. There are lots of different features that exist in the game that will allow you to do that job better. One thing you must remember is you are always the Pirate and can't play the game as a sugar planter or a merchant this time.
Tropico didn't have a campaign mode whereas the sequel does. The team wanted a story element to the game. Now you enter a name every time you start a campaign. The first episode, and the beginning story, starts you off as a labourer who has escaped from a plantation and decides to become a pirate. You have an ally who knows a little navigation and together you
steal a ship. You end up making it to an island where you meet buccaneers who love beer. The whole initial starting plot is creating a brewery and taverns to drink in to ensure the buccaneers are happy. This task will take the player 10 minutes to play and is designed to familiarise and introduce the player to some important concepts for the game.
Success will unlock the next plot, which will be more involved, with more tasks and requirements to earn gold, whilst learning more concepts. The difficulty factor and tasks grow as you progress to a point where hopefully you have some personal savings in your horde, which you can use and
you become a relatively strong player - becoming a ruler of an established, powerful pirate island. The campaign is linear comprising around 15 episodes with unfolding stories starting in 1660, ending 1730! âWeâve given the player the option of building their own pirate. We have put all the famous pirates in the mix, from Blackbeard to Long John Silver, and itâs up to you how you play the game by altering the chosen charactersâ attributes.â
Bill, the most enthusiastic games designer I have met, was eager to describe how a player generated game worked. "The first requirement is to choose where you want your secret island. It makes a big difference as to where it is placed but you will not know this initially. By placing it on an island close to others will make it much more likely that you would get a couple of settlements close by. These are useful for your pirates to go out and steal people. Placing it in the middle of an ocean, you get the opportunity of some great trade routes, allowing your pirates to go out and find other ships right away, although this could also be dangerous as ships have escorts. Geography is important to understand in having easy access to send out other ships in terms of time also.â Itâs no good placing your settlement in Venezuela if you intend to sail to Mexico. The distance means youâll need the biggest ship to get there but will you be able to return? Tropico2: Pirate Cove wonât have a set difficulty level such as easy, medium, or hard. âThe player sets his own level. You can control map size, how hilly your islands is, how much water, etc. all of which will make up the difficulty of the game. There are also special bonus victory conditions you can pick, like pirate happiness.â If you pick this option you will get an extra bonus if you keep your pirates happy! âBy altering the given options, your overall level of difficulty will change as a percentage. The lowest seen in play testing is about 25%, which wouldnât prove too taxing, and the top will be around 150%. Although it makes the game easier or harder, these percentages will reflect in your overall score at the end of the game.â
T2: PC has a nice dual aspect in its island focus but also the pirate ships, which the player does not control but designates areas of the Caribbean where he wants the ships to move. The ships you wish to plunder along with battle strategy is in your control - once a ship departs, however, it is out of his hands.
"Captains must be recruited and better captains cost more and will often arrive with a new and better ship. Players can also use pirate schools to improve his pirate's skills. It is interesting to note that all pirates improve based on their successes. On the island, pirates use their marksmanship skills in various special circumstances. Most important are the revolt of the captives or the coup attempts by some of the pirates. These are both ways that the player can lose the game. There is also an assassination edict."
"The pirates have a range of skills and requirements. Pirates need to rest, eat, drink, womanise, gamble, etc., which you must provide in a certain way. Their needs can change depending on the situation.â
Surprisingly, Tropico2: Pirate Cove will only have one resource - lumber. OK, there is gold (or plunder as itâs known within the game) but itâs used for paying your pirates. Everything is built from wood and all your buildings will look completely different as they are upgraded. An example: your initial âhouseâ will be a simple tent, but upgrade to the next level and your roof is an old boat. Keep improving your residence and youâll end up with something which makes Buckingham Palace look like a shed! In all, there will be seven stages of building with around 70 âobjectsâ to construct. Bear in mind though, that your chosen island can become overcrowded and âover resourcedâ so the need to ensure a good supply of wood is paramount.
Tropico 2: Pirate Cove builds on the witty addictive play of Tropico, whilst adding new innovations and changes to the rules. In effect, you get rich pirating the goods other people have made whilst also finding and keeping the captives too. Keeping the island economy moving along nicely falls largely to them. The default pirates are characters you'll spend time developing, as you build up mean fighting crews with specialties in boarding, cannon fire, harassment with muskets, etc. Take Blackbeard, Anne Bonny and a host of other buccaneers through a campaign spanning 100 years of piracy in the Caribbean. Visually the game is a real treat and Tropico2 is so full of ideas we have only touched on a few of them!!!
