Tropico 4

By: AAChaoshand

Version 1.0

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Table of Contents:
I.   Legal Stuff
II.  Introduction
III. The Basics
IV.  The People
V.   Buildings
VI.  Frequently Asked Questions
VII. Contact Information
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I. Legal Stuff
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This document is entirely my work (AAChaoshand) and shall not be posted without
 direct authorization from me.  GameFAQs is the primary host of this document a
nd can not authorize my work to be displayed anywhere else.  Please see the 
contact section if you desire to post this work on your website for your users!

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II. Introduction
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Tropico 4 is the next installment to the Tropico series that started in the 
early 2000's and continued to present.  Tropico is a city simulation style 
game and also has some military aspects that include hiring generals and 
obtaining soldiers.  Tropico is about managing an economy with various aspects
while also maintaining a small military presence to quell rebels and possible 
invasions, assuming you survive an invasion.  Tropico introduces many obstacles
throughout the game that include natural disasters such as tornadoes, 
volcanoes, hurricanes, droughts, tsunamis, and oil spills.  Each of these 
disasters can ruin you if you are not at least slightly prepared for them as 
they have the capability to completely ruin your island.  While in the world 
of Tropico you can issue laws known as edicts that change how your island 
functions.  A few edicts that can be mentioned are social security, book BBQ, 
secret police, wire tapping, pollution standards, and more.  Tropico is a very 
diverse game and each mission has many ways to succeed and even more ways to 
fail.  Tropico also offers a sandbox mode in which you set the rules for 
winning, if there even is one, and build to your hearts content.  The tutorial
is excellent at getting your feet wet but will not teach you some lessons that 
can only be learned the hard way.

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III. The Basics
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Let's start with the basics of Tropico and by basics I mean straight up 1st 
grade information. Firstly, money makes the world go round, even a communist 
can agree to that and without it you are going to get overthrown, shot, and 
bagged.  In Tropico, every year in January you will recieve a foreign aid 
package consisting of a certain amount of money from the US or the USSR or both
depending on how you are running your country.  Do not count on this to bring 
you out of deficit as it is only there to help you get off your feet in the 
beginning.  Later in the game, the aid is more of a wage recoup for all of 
your workers since it never really amounts to much.  Now let us move on to the 
subsections!

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1. Food
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Food makes your people happy and stay alive.  Normally, you will have a few 
farms and/or ranches at the very beginning.  One farm can support 50 people 
but do not play with the math to much as it will get you into trouble later 
on.  I suggest you build as many farms as you have unemployed people early on 
as this will guarantee you not only food but also give you a surplus that you 
can sell or use in another industry later on.  Every so often your people will 
get hungry and go take a break for food, when doing so they have a fork and 
spoon icon above them to show that they are hungry.  Make sure you have some 
sort of food supply nearby or at least a garage in which they can access to get
to the food.  I will go more into details of garages and distances later.  For
now, just know that food needs to be local if possible.  Time is money and 
time wasted is money wasted. Now just because you made a farm doesn't mean your
people are going to eat what it produces.  Do you expect people to eat sugar, 
tobacco, and coffee?  I know I wouldn't and these types of farms are for export
and industry use only.  Your people will eat corn, pineapples, and bananas.

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2. Happiness
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Happiness normally defaults to 50 in each scenerio and will go up or down 
depending on what you do.  Getting anything above 70 is actually pretty good 
and you probably know what your doing at that point.  Happiness is a measure 
of how your people feel about your rule.  Anything you do can affect your 
happiness score and it takes quite a bit to get it up to a tolerable range in 
the beginning.  Things like social security, food for the people, national day,
free housing, etc. can all improve happiness.  There are several things that 
happiness banks on and you can find them all in your almanac in game.  The 
criteria for keeping your people happy are:

A. Crime
B. Liberty
C. Food
D. Housing
E. Religion
F. Job Quality
G. Entertainment
H. Envrionment
I. Healthcare
J. Respect

Note that these are averaged and result in a average happiness which is 
displayed in your lower left corner.  Getting these out of the red is generally
a good idea and will prevent you from having to deal with more rebels and 
criminals as well as ensuring you don't get voted out of office if you even let
your people vote.  

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A.Crime
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Crime is generally a problem if you don't have police stations or not enough of
them.  Placing police stations near neighborhoods is great but you also need 
to ensure your industry isn't getting robbed, bombed, and set on fire as well.
Use the "Overlays ->> People ->> Crime" display to show you where crime is 
present.  Anything yellow or red indicated some crime with red being the worst.
In large neighborhoods it may be necessary to have more than one police 
station nearby.  Issuing the secret police edict as well as wire tapping can 
also help reduce and precent crime.

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B. Liberty
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A few things affect liberty.  Voting will raise overall liberty.  Building T.V.
stations and broadcasting BBC News will also raise liberty and you can also 
use newspapers and radio stations to help with this stat as well.  Honestly, 
my liberty is generally high due to extensive T.V., papers, and radio stations 
so I never have an issue here.  

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C. Food
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Food quality is just a measure of how much they get to eat and how much of a 
variety.  They are perfectly happy eating just corn as long as you issue the 
Food for the People edict.  Ensure you have enough farms for this edict as 
your people will consume twice as much as they did.  Any exports you were 
relying on are officially used up so build more farms if you were exporting 
pineapple, corn, beef, or bananas.

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D. Housing
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Housing is one of the constant issues in the game.  Initially you have enough 
cash to build some pretty crappy houses like bunkhouses, tenements, and 
shanties.  These are fine temporarily but once your economy gets going you need
to upgrade to apartments.  If you can't get apartments due to money, at least 
upgrade to air conditioning for the tenements and get rid of those trashy 
bunkhouses.  The best way to go is put everyone in apartments as it is cheaper 
initially then just upgrade them to A/C and you can be putting out a decent 
housing rating.  Everything after apartments, such as condos and mansions are a
plus but I never let me uneducated live in them as that would involve me 
setting the rent low or keeping their wages the same as everyone elses which 
isn't cool with me personally.  Initially when people move to your island and 
you do not have enough homes they build shacks which are the lowest possible 
housing in the game.  You need to do whatever it takes to get them out of 
there as that really drags your score down the quickest.  Tenements are 
perfect for starting islands.  One last thing, when building condos and 
mansions you will require electric so make sure you already have that in place 
or quickbuild it.

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E. Religion
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This is another major issue that you need to ensure adequate attention is 
applied to.  Religion is another major need of your people and without it they 
get cranky.  One church in one neighborhood will not be enough.  You need to 
ensure that you build enough churches to house at least 2/3 of your people.  
The reason I say 2/3 is that not everyone is going to go to church at the same 
time but not having enough slots will surely anger people that need to go but 
are turned away due to the church being at full capacity.  Cathedrals really 
serve no huge purpose.  I would build one to satisfy your religous faction 
leader as any more than that is really a waste of funds.  Churchs are cheaper 
and can be build in smaller areas.

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F. Job Quality
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Job quality is based on what occupation your citizen holds.  The uneducated get
the lowest while the college guys get the best quality.  You can raise and 
lower this value by adjusting their wages accordingly.  I generally pay my 
uneducated 15, highschool 20, and college 25 at the mid point of each mission.
This value won't just adjust itself and can only be adjusted by you.  Again, 
you can adjust their wages to increase the quality and some buildings even have
add-ons that raise it as well such as the sky lights.

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G. Entertainment
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Most people think that if they build 15 pubs the entertainment should go to 
100% as they cover everyone.  This isn't the case.  Entertainment is calculated
by the amount of people serviced and what the service quality if the building 
is.  So if you build a pub with a service quality of say 25 then you can expect
people to be at least moderately statisfied but building casinos, night clubs,
cabarets, sports centers, and others will raise it significantly more.  Make 
sure you have enough of these buildings to support your island.

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H. Environment
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This has to do with overall beauty.  Pollution has a large effect on beauty and
envrionment so ensure you have garbage dumps and clean electric like windmills
and gas powerplants.  Coal and a lack of dumps as well as factories make a 
place nasty.  You can issue edicts to improve this score as well such as the 
anti-litter policy and the pollution standards.  It doesn't take much to get 
this score to a decent level.  Just make sure your taking care of your trash.

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I. Healthcare
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This is one of the more paramount scores.  If you have bad healthcare your 
people get sick and die.  Clinics and hospitals can improve this score but as 
I said with religion, more than one hospital really isn't necessary as long as 
you position your clinics strategically.  If you put one clinic in a major 
housing area then it's going to get overloaded and people are going to get 
upset.  I normally position healthcare clinics near industry as well as 
housing so people do not have to go far for their health needs.

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J. Respect
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If you continually hose your people over respect will be lost.  If you can't 
meet their needs then respect is lost.  If you can't pay them something decent 
enough for them to survive respect is lost.  You get the point right?  Make 
sure the people love you and do as they ask when you can afford it.

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3. Money
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Money is something you need to be careful about in this game.  Spending to much
can put you so far in the hole you can never get out.  Exporting goods is the 
best way to obtain cash but tourism can also keep you afloat.  I personally 
deal with exporting more than tourism as it is a sure fire way of guaranteeing 
massive amounts of money.  The better the product you export the more money.  
The values they sell for a peice are in the almanac and can change 
periodically.  Now here is an example of exporting.  Lets say you have 
pineapple and export it at 10 dollars a peice.  You export say 15 pineapple 
and make 150 dollars right?  Now, that may be sufficient in the very beginning 
but won't so squat later.  The best way to make money off of cheap farm goods 
is to send them to a factory.  Pineapple can be canned so that it is worth 
more and can sell for significantly more than in raw form.  This is the same 
for coffee and fish as well.  You can take tobacco and send it to a cigar 
factory for major cash later on.  Just remember, 2 cigar factories do not 
increase profits if you can not supply both of them.  You need to ensure that 
you have enough supply on hand to ship to the factory.

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IV. The People
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There are several types of people in tropico but the main ones you need to be 
concerned with are the uneducated, highschooled, and college. 

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A. Uneducated 
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These citizens are the bulk of your workforce early on and produce the raw 
materials needed for exporting and industry.  Generally they work the worst 
jobs and have the worst job quality until you raise their wages or improve the 
building they work in, assuming that is an option.  These are great to get in 
your island at first but you want to set the immigration to skilled workers 
only to help reduce the amount of uneducated later on as they tend to start 
living in shacks since you will not need any additional raw materials as you 
already will have what you need at hand.

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B. High Schooled
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These citizens are what make your island a little better to live on and supply 
your industry work force.  Generally considered the "middle class" of the 
game.  They make decent wages, can live in apartments and condos, and have a 
higher job quality than the uneducated.  They fill roles such as police 
officer, factory workers, high school teacher, grade school teacher, etc.

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C. College
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These citizens are your highest paid and most important when it comes to 
meeting the criteria for a booming island.  They control hospitals, clinics, 
power plants, and more.  If you plan on having a massive electrical grid you 
will definitely need these people.  They generally have an awesome job quality 
to start with so increasing their pay will only make it better.

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V. Buildings (Comming Soon)
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There are many different kinds of buildings that can be built and I will go 
into each one available through the interface in which you select the 
buildings.  We will start with housing since that will be the easiest.

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VI. Frequently Asked Questions
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1Q: Is Tropico 4 multiplayer?
1A: No, there are leaderboards and you can visit uploaded islands to see 
    general layouts of        other players.  You can not modify their island.

2Q: What are the system requirements for Tropico 4?
2A: Minimum System Requirements:
    OS: Windows XP SP3 (32-bit), Vista / 7 (32 or 64-bit)
    Processor: 2 GHz Dual Core CPU
    Memory: 1 GB RAM
    Graphics: Shader Model 3.0 (Geforce 6600 or higher, Radeon X1600-Series),
    256 MB, DirectX 9.0c
    DirectX�: 9.0c
    Hard Drive: 5 GB free hard disk space
    Sound: DirectX compatible

3Q: My people don't take the jobs I put down! Why?
3A: Well there could be a few reasons for this.  Firstly, you may not have 
    enough people for the building you placed,  Secondly, you may have 
    to increase the pay of that building temporarily so that people will go 
    that far for the job.  Finally, make sure that you have a college schooled 
    person for a college building like a clinic.  An uneducated citizen can 
    not work in a clinic as a doctor and neither can a high school educated 
    citizen. 

4Q: What is the maximum population limit?
4A: I personally do not know, however I have had over 700 citizens in one 
    mission so that should be a good gauge as to how large you can get an 
    island.
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VII. Contact Information
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Should you desire to contact me to post my FAQ on your page or just have 
questions please feel free to.  I check my email often and reply only to 
emails with legitimate subjects.  If you are going to contact me please put 
something like "GameFAQs" or "Your Tropico 4 FAQ" in the subject line so that 
I do not delete it thinking it was spam.  Below is my contact information.

Brandon (AKA AAChaoshand)
[email protected]

I will generally reply within 24 hours but there are days where I have much 
to do at work so please be patient.