[Guardian]

Just curious if people consider Tropico a city-builder, or another sort of game. 

I only pose the question, because I've noticed a few places where its mentioned that Tropico is too tongue-in-cheek and more management than city builder.

Share your thoughts!

[SpookyZalost]

hmm... I'd consider it more like a village/town/empire management sim with city building elements.

[Darth-Apple]

Hmm I looked it up. Never heard of it before today.

It looks very interesting indeed. Doesn't seem to have quite the exact same target that Simcity and Cities: Skylines had. But it seems to bear some resemblance to the scenarios feature that was present in Simcity 3000. Scenarios were pre-built cities that had objectives (e.g. grow the city to a certain population, reduce crime to X level, etc. etc. ) associated with them. The scenarios were actually quite a lot of fun.

In a way I kinda miss Simcity 3000 a bit. The graphics and features were far inferior, but then again, it was an ancient game. Simcity 4 had quite a hell of a run all on its own though.

[SpookyZalost]

@Darth: you know until recently Simcity 3K was the only simcity to be natively ported to linux?
the original was ported under Micropolis... though there was a unix port of it which supported multiplayer on servers way way back when.
but really simcity 3K unlimited was the only Simcity that worked and it was ported by one of the first linux porting companies (responsible for porting such titles as Alpha centauri, railroad Tycoon 2 Gold, Postal 2, and were supposed to port the original Deus ex but were ahead of their time and closed down.)

anyway getting a bit off topic but I've got a copy of SC3KU for linux and it works still with some patches, mods work too.
gotta love the SCURK stuff!

as for tropico... I sure hope the next revision comes out on linux, it's a real shame honestly, it's a great game that I have to boot into windows to play atm.

[Kyng]

I'm unsure, but I can see the argument that it is.

On the surface, it does indeed look more like an empire management game than a city-builder. However, the area of play is quite small (certainly no larger than the area in Cities: Skylines), so it often tends to play out like a city-builder in practice. So, it definitely has strong elements of city-building, but it also has elements of empire management (even of those are more superficial). I guess the question of whether or not you classify it as a "city-builder" just comes down to a philosophical question of "Lumpers vs. Splitters": lumpers would classify it as one, and splitters would not.

(As for the fact that it's tongue-in-cheek: it is, but I don't think that really matters. There's nothing in the definition of "city-builder" to exclude tongue-in-cheek games !)

[Darth-Apple]

@Kyng: Never thought of it that way. Building a nation in such a small space seems like Simcity's most recent iteration. (Here. You got 1 Square Kilometer. Make a city of a million residents in it... )

The city building genre was a little stale until CSL came along. It's good to see things that are fresh every once in a while.

[Kyng]

Yeah, it's pretty much impossible to make a 'city' of 1 million people in Tropico. Even on high-performance machines, the population is soft-capped at 10,000 (meaning once you get above that limit, the periodic immigration of new citizens stops, and is replaced by an emigration of citizens)

Anyway, I see Wikipedia refers to all of the Anno games as city-builders, even though they have more in common with Tropico than with Cities: Skylines in terms of gameplay and scale. IMO, the Anno and Tropico series are similar enough to belong in the same genre - so, if one is a city-building series, then so is the other.

[Darth-Apple]

10K is kinda low in my opinion. It'd feel kinda like building a village. Then again, it kinda keeps things a little smaller and more detail-focused I suppose, but I've never played it.

Cities Skylines kinda does the soft cap thing too where demand just goes close to zero once you pass 200-300K. It's very difficult to grow past that without demand mods. It was probably a computer performance thing to be honest.

[Kyng]

Yeah, I have to admit, Tropico doesn't really have the same sense of scale as something like Cities: Skylines .

For this reason, I tend to think about Tropico's scale and distance in a more abstract way than it's presented in-game. For example, I've found myself thinking "Each house represents an entire street", and "Each square of the map could be up to a mile across". It's not ideal, but it helps me to enjoy the game more .

[Darth-Apple]

Or Simcity 2013. Each sidewalk tile represents a city block.