"Absolute Power" expansion announced. 03/01/10

Advanced search

If you registered for membership on this site but have not yet received the confirmation activation email, there are 3 main reasons.

1. It ended up in your junk or spam folder, please look there to see if it's in there.

2. You did not enter your correct email address.  Please register with a new username and the correct email address and try again.

3. Your IP address and or your Email Address is listed in the Stop Forum Spam (spam protection) database as a known spammer and when either your IP address and or your email address appears in that database, your account can not be approved.  As such if you are a spammer, please move along, our community is too small for you to bother with.  If you are NOT a spammer, contact the owners of Stop Forum Spam and get your information removed from their database and register a new account.

[CoconutKid]

New features of the Absolute Power expansion include:

• New campaign featuring 10 missions on a separate map (all islands are also available in sandbox mode)
• New buildings (including Garbage Dump, Marina, Small Garage, Children's Playground, and more...) and a new buildings category for current and new decorations with individual icon models
• New “Megalomania” Edicts - demonstrate your absolute power by ordering the construction of a huge golden statue of Tropico's top export, declaring an annual festival dedicated to yourself or even print your own money!
• Six New Landmarks – build huge decorations and structures which dominate the island landscape and make each island unique.
• New Faction - The “Loyalist Faction” are your die-hard supporters and want no elections (since El Presidente is obviously the best candidate) and want a statue of their beloved leader on every corner!
• Faction Disasters - Low standing with any island faction will trigger new disasters if not addressed
• New Intro and Win/Lose Cutscenes
• Four Additional Avatar Costumes – Two for male and two for female avatars
• Beautification upgrades for the presidential palace including rooftop pool, extra towers, flags, banners and a larger balcony (which will increase the effects of balcony speeches)
• More icons displaying the status of buildings and displaying input/output storage numbers for selected buildings
• Prevalent Faction - In every sandbox game one faction is chosen as "prevalent" on the island. Members of this faction will be especially numerous throughout the entire game and their satisfaction will be more important than usual
• More radio announcements to guide you through Tropico’s daily life
• Gravel Roads – A second type of road for rural areas with decreased travel speed

.

Tropico 3 Absolute Power is currently in development by Haemimont Games and will be available in Summer 2010 for a suggested retail of price of $19.99. Absolute Power requires the full version of Tropico 3 PC to play.

Ironically, the announcement was datelined "Baltimore, MD" and included a quote from Deborah Tillett who was a management official of 'Breakaway' when Paradise Island was developed.

“Tropico 3 has been an outstanding critical and commercial success, and has continued to build on and grow a loyal and rabid fanbase,” said Deborah Tillett, President, Kalypso Media USA. “With the ‘Absolute Power’ expansion, we’re thrilled to provide fans around the world with new content and new ways to enjoy the game.”

[City Builder]

Am amazed that they listened to us with the smaller garage, upgrades to the palace and the gravel roads.

Just being able to not have to use the original HUGE garage might be worth the price alone.  Good Golly that original garage is bad.

[pad11]

yeah, this is a big plus....i really do like Haemimont...a very dedicated city building developer....

pat!

[RhiannOn]

Excellent.  Smaller garages and gravel roads...yippee   

[CoconutKid]

  Humm?

You guys are going to be happy to pay them for prepping-up the sweepings off the cutting room floor and dumping a bunch of used Roman monuments onto a Caribbean island?

Those "new" buildings?  If they are not off the cutting room floor, I can only repeat the Medieval Poke Inspector's suggestion: "Be sure to look the pig in the face before you buy a pig in a poke."

Much of that list is textual stuff which will further unbalance the game.

And there's nothing that says the markets will show their food stocks and you will ever have the food distribution system explained.

Is anyone talking about a "game guide" of any kind -- even a translation of the German one with its limited format?

[City Builder]

I think that you'd need to understand that the people here at CBG are not the hardcore people that once were or maybe are at the dedicated Tropico websites.  In general, I've noted there are a couple different type of game players.  Those that are hard core and dedicated to the very end.  They will pick up a game and play it for x amount of years, learning every possible thing there is to know about a game, and there is another group of game players that will pick up a game, play it for oh maybe 6 months or so and move onto the next hot title in this genre, and although these same people will reload a game in this genre years after it was made, they in general don't play it to try to sop up every last drop of gravy in the game, but rather play just for the fun of playing the game.  I think this second type of person is more what we have here at CBG.

Oh and there is the other kind of player too that wants to be known as the hardcore player and will go out of his or her way to show off any knowledge of T3 that they have managed to attain while playing T3 but are not the real number crunching type of player but will spill out numbers in a seemingly constant supply without getting down to the very nitty gritty number crunching in the game.

Just for note, I am not saying whom around here fits into what category, I don't care what other people fall into, I for myself am a more vain type of player of T3, it's not that serious of a game that I want to really get out the calculator and crunch any numbers for it.  I'd rather play it to design a good looking island that functions good, and is as close to being efficient as it can be without having to concern myself with any major number crunching.

So, while we may never know the real numbers behind the food stocks, we will still play it in a manner that we enjoy.  Thus getting two items (if not more) that were probably the most requested item can make some of us quite happy.

From what I remember around here we really only had one member that would go out of his way to create a game guide about the games that we play, but nobody has heard from him since he (I think) had another stroke or heart attack.  I'm just not dedicated enough to any one game to try to create a game guide or even translate what ever our German friends might be doing at the moment.

Out of the regular members that may still visit and or do visit here, I don't think any of them were hardcore Tropico 1 players other than the person I was speaking about above, who used to keep all kinds of knowledge physically written down in notebooks from what I remember him telling me and he would be considered "hardcore" in the CB games that he played, but also could lean back and be happy with addons such as this one.

Okay with all that crud aside.....

So, I'm looking at the list above again and trying to figure out where you mean that' it's textual and will further unbalance the game.  I really don't see how T3 has to try to be as balanced as the original game might have been. I am however, hoping that there is a lot more to the update than what they have let us know about thus far.  Simple things such as the ability to enter in a seed number and have the same island created like they said should have been put in the original T3 to begin with but which was a major oversight not to be in it.

[CoconutKid]

I have always understood that there is a wide variation among player attitudes and styles.    Sometimes I get carried away while looking for folks who are interested in the mechanics of the game. 

You have answered my questions. Your answers fairly much indicate that the Kalypso marketing department knows what it is doing.

BTW - Balance \ smalance!    Forget that since you are not interested. Textual = stuff that you don't see directly on the screen. An example is the "edicts" ; they (by and large) simply adjust factors in the code and the effects are indirect. Such stuff is far easier than new or addition art work. 

[City Builder]

Yeah I don't know what it is with Tropico 3 but it just doesn't interest me mechanically.  Don't get me wrong, theres a lot of games that I'm interested in the mechanics like the Anno 1404 or 1701 series totally interests me in the underlying mechanics and or balancing, but Tropico 3 is a much more casual game to me and they (Haemimont) are a little lax in helping us to fully understand, since it seems very rare that they go out of their way to try to explain somethng that people are theorizing on.

[City Builder]

Oh and remember this is just me, for all I know there are others here that are very interested in the underlying mechanics of the game.

[CoconutKid]

@ CB,

I'd guess that it's the kind/nature of the mechanics. I enjoyed ANNO 1602 and 1503; but 1404 added some stuff in which I wasn't interested - so I dropped out. I'm guessing that the elements of the building based economy didn't change much in the series. Except for the military, the people are decorations spawned by the buildings. So the essential economy revolves around buildings and their placement.

In the original Tropico (I can't speak for T3), the people are independent of the buildings in the sense that the buildings are passive tools (for the most part) to be used by the people. The people have their own rhythms and limits which set the pace for building placement and construction. That's quite the reverse of the ANNO series.

It is a frequent complaint on the Kalypso forum, "I have built 'thus&so' building(s) and it/they is/are not doing anything." To me, that indicates that the player is habituated to building centered game economies and has missed the point of a people centered 'Tropico'. At the same time, far too many of the players who have some knowledge of T1 fail to recognize that Haemimont has "tweeked" the hell out of the underlying logic. e.g. in a very recent discussion of the media, an old-timer still considers placing radio & TV on heights (to expand zone of coverage) even though Chrono or Lyubo explained that T3 doesn't use that, but rather proximity to residences -- a significant change and perhaps from building\people to building\building my memory gets worse day-by-day. Look here:
http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/showthread.php?tid=2709

Actually Haemimont has provided quite a lot of information and explanation. I fault them for the methods. They send out scouts like Assen, Lyubo or Chrono to read forums. Then, in select cases, they jump-in and provide a bare-bones description of what the game does. But it is never repeated, nor do they take responsibility repeating it or compiling FAQs.


A side-bar on the size of buildings in T3. It needs to be remembered that one of the primary intents of Haemimont was to "correct the building scale imperfections of T1." The claim was that some\many\most of the T1 buildings are out-of-scale with the cartoonish people of T1. It's true enough that some (at least) are too small as if they are compressed into too small a foot-print in order to keep the buildings within fairly uniform like standard 'building-block' footprints. It seems that they went crashing in the opposite extreme and startled the hell out of the city-builders.