I've never played any of the Tropicos. What do we think of them? ...
Of course you could never guess my bias.
T1 + PI has all of the original flavor of a tiny "Tinpot" Caribbean dictatorship. Visually, it is a caricature -- and therefore less than satisfactory to hard-core builders. However, the land formation is quite realistic (not a mass of stacked pancakes with random road-apple rocks). The music track is a real prize winner - unless you hate the genre.
T2 is simply a Pirate game which tries to capture the flavor of T1. It's well done but hard to become absorbed in -- the battles are abstracted and it takes some time to develop a feel for them. It can be great fun, if you persist a bit -- but it is no way a city builder.
You can get both of them on the
Tropico Reloaded edition (from Kalypso) which should be fairly cheap by now - $10 or under. With it, you have no worry with patches or publication protections.
T3 was developed in Bulgaria for a German publisher. IMHO, it lost the tiny Caribbean island flavor, but became highly oriented to hard core city building. The people and buildings are not caricatures, but rather carefully scaled simulations. The newly added roads and motor vehicles are a game in themselves. As with T1, you really have to have the expansion - Absolute Power - to have the whole game. T1 players recognize "landmarks" in gameplay, but the underlying techniques are completely revised. Caveat: I don't own it because I don't care to struggle with the publication protections and on-line requirements for patches. From the discussion board comments I've seen, many players find it a fun game but with far less replay interest than T1. It seems to be just another European builder game dressed in the
Tropico costume - which is different from Rome or the 15th and 16th centuries.
T4 is under development. So far it sounds like little more than a second expansion for T3.
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