Tropico 3 Gold Edition

Great game, it has real dictators to choose as your character. Runs in 4k and is still beautiful and graphically demanding in 2023. I got Tropico 3 to run on Linux under Wine by using winetricks to "create 32bit wine prefix" "install Directx9 and d3dx41" "use winecfg to run in Win7 mode" and "launch wine explorer" then "run tropico3.exe from explorer window.

After having played T1 and T2, this is my favorite "Tropico". Don't get me wrong, T3 is not better that T1 and T2 in every aspect. T1 is a more accurate simulation in some regards. E.g. in T1 roads have its construction time like anything else and you 100% must take that in account for long roads. I didn't really enjoyed the level of detail of the simulation T1. At some point started to feel like a chore. To do well I needed to keep in mind "too many" things at the same time. Take this "too many" with a grain of salt, I more a RPG player than a managerial games player. T2 story and setting is more interesting to me. I also prefer games to have a camping, T3 base game doesn't have one. In T3 every thing felt a little streamlined in comparison with T1. The addition of cars and garages is a welcome change. I like to be able to have farmers to living in "the city" and have the farms far away. Laying road through though tight and or uneven spaces is a pain. I always save before starting to lay road and load those saves more often than I like to admit. I like you can chose the profile of your character at the start of each island. You can reuse the last one you used just by pressing next a number of times or "build" a totally new ruler. I "HATE" the DJ but is safe to turn him off at the game settings. In 2022, running Windows 10 I had zero (0) crashes nor technical issues.

You launch the game and it immediately ask for a serial key. Having installed and launched this game from Gog Galaxy client my reaction was "What serial key?" I checked the extras section, nothing. I checked the installation folder, nothing. I went to gog.com, went to my library, found this game, clicked more, found serial keys option, clicked it, only for it to tell me that the motherfucking serial keys have expired!!! Only after that I've noticed on the bottom a little message from gog saying that "the servers for this game is dead and here's a working serial key." Why should anyone have to go through this much bullshit?

The economics system is pretty straightforward. I was able to turn a profit within my first few games, and the game does a good job of explaining why things are behaving how they are. There are some issues with having to use trial and error to get buildings to work, but overall this game is very fun.

I bought this game on sale even though I already own it on steam. I already played for 60 h and I still enjoy the game. I haven't even touched the Absolute Power Missions (Expansion). After a while you just get to know the effects of your actions very well. I usually just lower the audio and listen to a podcast. It's very relaxing. There could be a little more variety, but for the most part changing the mission objectives and events do enough to motivate me to keep playing. This is also the kind of game were you can challange yourself and restrict your options to increase the difficulty. Sometimes I think I have everything figured out and just relax for a while, watching the citizen of Tropico go about their daily lifes... and then I realise that there are a lot of homeless people and that the trade profits are suddenly dangerously low... I love these moments, especially when I can turn things around.