Cars

[5strong]

Why no cars in Tropico?   the rich could live in the nice area of the island drive to their jobs in the bad part without wasting much energy.  There could be a rent a car company for tourists.  public transportation for the poor.  Maybe even tanks for them military.  Oh yeah you could build car dealerships to raise the happiness and productivty of your citizens (and of course make a profit).

Suggestions welcome  

[skot]

this has been talked about quite extensively, and it seems the popular idea is that we would all like to see vehicles, but the practical aspects to the programming of the game seem too much to do this without causing more problems than it is worth.  i think taxis & buses would be cool - cars, even limos for the wealthy & important.

but for now, we are all behind in Tropico no matter if you take an open-ended game to the year 2050 - no friggin vehicles!  not even ass-drawn carts.


-skot

[Mkinser]

I like not having cars.  I don't have to build roads...I don't need extra hospitals and clinics for the people that get in accidents...I don't need more construction workers to maintain the roads and I don't need to worry about even more pollution.  Face it, the island is relatively small..let them walk.

[skot]

very good point, mkinser, but i still want a bullet-proof stretch limo with a jacuzzi and fully-stocked bar.




-skot

[caddet]

Actually, the jacuzzi in the limo is over-rated.  It's usually more in the way than useful.  And the cost of upgrading my suspension for the weight wasn't worth it.  You don't re-coup the cost when you replace the car.

[Eddy]

Yes, I didn't take that option, but I did pay extra for the lighted makeup table and the walk-in shoe closet.

Of course I had to get rid of things like seat belts, air bags, the horn, etc.

You know what I've always wanted?  That limo from "Escape from New York".  The one with the chandelier on it.

[caddet]

You made a wise decision, Eddy.  And it's cheaper to take the options when you buy the car.  I had the jacuzzi added after-market.  It's much more expensive that way!

[Eddy]

Tell me about it.  The reason I bought the new limo was because I needed to get armor plating and bullet proof tires for the old one (long story) and after pricing things, it was cheaper to get the new one with the extras included than to try to retrofit the old one.

Of course, its not as if it is my money senor, but you know how it is when you are a cheapskate.

[caddet]

If the money is in your hands, you do well to use it wisely.  Even if it's not your money.  After all, that money has to meet your other needs too.  No use wasting it.

[Kuplo]

...  Face it, the island is relatively small..let them walk.

Face it, the island while relatively small, is still too large to make walking effective.  I tried to build a tourists dream vacation spot away from the riff raf of society near my palace, and found that building a road to the other side of the island took over 30 or was it 50 years to just get half way, either roads need to be completed in 1/4th the time or cars, busses, donkey drawn carts need to be added in.  Walking across the island is not a feasible plan.

Yes, you guessed it, mass public transportation is a sore spot for me, since I hate waiting for 70+ years just to build a road that will still take people too long to walk.  It really seems that the game was designed to be built outward from where your palace is started at, not to build anywhere on the island, but rather to just start at your palace and build out.  Thats a shame.

[Eddy]

I'd either like to see faster Tropicans (or a time scale that doesn't have them taking three months to walk a block and a half) or at least a tweak to make the tropicans less tired when they walk.  I don't care if they get tired at work, but come on, how tiring is it to walk, especially if you are a fit and trim farmer.  Now the bankers probably get tired walking to the buffet table.  

[Gigabyte]

I think that The Game needs some cars, but not too much... It will make the traffic problem actual (while even now some men use to hold each other not letting each other go...), and also< cars will decrease performance of the game...

[5strong]

About the island being small, most of the islands are atleast 30 square miles (about the size of Manhattan, could you imagine walking that far everyday of your life?).  Most of my people walk atleast 5 miles a day in both directions, give them a break....

[adupuis]

look in older days there was no cars.
they only had horses or walk to work.

[Kuplo]

look in older days there was no cars.
they only had horses or walk to work.

Yes in olden days they only had horses, but the game takes place from 1950 onwards when even small latin countries had cars, busses etc.  Granted a lot of them were junk heaps, but they had them to get around, it's one of the fundamental basics of economy to transport your citizens from here to there, now if every citizen stays in a small radius then theres no need for mass transport, but your dealing with an entire island.

[caddet]

I've noticed that it doesn't matter how far away you put your tourist buildings.  They will walk all the way across the largest island possible, if they want to.  The same applies to your Tropicans.  If they're going to work, they'll only walk so far.  But they'll walk all over the island, in a circular path, if there's work you want them to do when they don't want to do it.

[Kuplo]

The real problem is that since you dont directly control people in Tropico, you can't really tell one construction worker to take up residence on the outskirts where you just built a bunkhouse, so that they are near the construction area, but rather you evict them and they have a tendancy to find other accomodations near to where they were living, you can eventually chase them out of all housing in hopes that they will take up residence where you want, but it's really a crap shoot.

The problem with putting something on the other side of the island, is that it takes them 2 or so months to walk over there, and then they work for like 5 to 15 seconds (dont know what that is in t time), which is inefficient to say the least.

I guess if we all just mold our gameplay to that which the designers constructed the game thinking we would do, then wer'e okay, but personally I hate that, I love to build tourist resorts on the far side of my islands to keep up the beauty of the area over there, but this doesnt really work well in Tropico, but now that I know about the Rapido cheat, I can instant build a tourist town, then only need to wait for the people to come populate that area.

While I've never seen it, perhaps someone else has, in that when someone takes a job on the other side of the island, the logical thing would be for them to leave their home on the other side of the island and move to something closer, I have yet to witness this, has anyone else seen this happen on a consistant basis?

[caddet]

I did some experimenting with getting people to work and live where I wanted.  I had some success, but had to plan carefully.  Here's what I did, and how it turned out.

After selecting the site and building a new construction office, I fired 3 unmarried construction workers and "xed" out their jobs.  They took jobs at the new construction office.  I immediately "xed" out all the other jobs at the new office to keep them from getting filled and ruining my experiment.

Then I had them build an apartment building next door.  As soon as that was done, I evicted them from their old homes, and they moved in next door.  I now had 3 people living and working at the new site.  So far, so good.

At that point, I re-opend the jobs at the original construction offices, because they would have no reason to go back to their old positions.  That allowed immigrants to fill those slots.

Then I decided who else I wanted to move.  In my experiment, I had 2 already established construction offices to pick from.  In those offices, I found 4 construction workers whose spouses were all farmers.  They would be the perfect guinea pigs.

I had the 3 construction workers already living and working at the new office quickly build a farm close by.  It didn't matter what the farm grew, just that it was a farm.  With the game paused, I then fired the 4 construction workers and their farmer spouses, and evicted them at the same time.  All 4 moved to the new apartment building and took the jobs at the new office and farm.

Success!  I now had a functioning "town" in the area I wanted to expand in.  With 7 construction workers and a fully staffed farm, this became a building town.  Since there was no teamster office in the area yet, most of the food grown stayed there as a food supply.  That town soon had it's own church, more apartment buildings, a clinic, a marketplace, entertainment facilities, and other industries.

This experiment became my most successful island to date, because it was just too successful to stop after the experiment was finished.  It is the only island I have ever gotten an airport up and running on.

[calm_blue_sea]

I'm not sure the game needs cars.....but how 'bout a narrow gauge railway to haul ore (and perhaps miners) from a far flung mine? The railway should be limited in its use and quite an undertaking to build - lots of money and grading, an ongoing project. (I imagine Poptop intentionally steered clear of  railways for this game).

[Melvin]

I think that public transportation could work. What you would need to do first is making the building of roads easier and faster. Once you have the roads up, you then could simply make a bus route with a couple of stops near a housing district and then near most peoples jobs. This would speed up travel times alot and shouldn't slow down game speed too much.

Another neat thing would be the ability to have a car or something that can haul workers from one side of the island to the other without them getting all tired out.

I think that trucks to haul ore and lumber around would also be pretty cool. That would speed up the hauling of goods from your far-off mines alot.

[flagator_]

Face it, the island while relatively small, is still too large to make walking effective.  I tried to build a tourists dream vacation spot away from the riff raf of society near my palace, and found that building a road to the other side of the island took over 30 or was it 50 years to just get half way.

The solution there isn't an island-spanning road, but a yachts-only port near the tourist area. As long as everything the tourists want is in their area, they won't walk all the way across the island. (Though they still walk all the way across the island to get to something I've neglected to build in the tourist area, like a pub. They'd rather trudge 30 miles to drink in a grimy workingman's pub with sweaty miners and teamsters... go figure. Loco gringos. )

[Melvin]

I really dont think that the problem is the tourists, its that the construction workers take forever to walk over there and build the hotels and such. I've started to just build tourist areas towards the middle of my island so I can at least finish them in a reasonable amount of time.

[Kuplo]

The solution there isn't an island-spanning road, but a yachts-only port near the tourist area. As long as everything the tourists want is in their area, they won't walk all the way across the island. (Though they still walk all the way across the island to get to something I've neglected to build in the tourist area, like a pub. They'd rather trudge 30 miles to drink in a grimy workingman's pub with sweaty miners and teamsters... go figure. Loco gringos. )

The problem is that you must have employees to run the tourist area, generally you can build some nice houses for your employees in and put some trees, fountains etc around them to still keep a nice appearance, but its in the beginning, when you want to build your tourist area on the other side of the island, the problem isn't with the gringos themselves but with your workers, and their taking 2 months to walk across the island to work for 15 seconds then walk back home.

Cars or mass transport are almost essential to build anything on the other side of the island (in any believable semi realistic time frame - but then again for an airport to take 30+ years to build isnt all that realistic anyway) if thats the way you like to build

[Melvin]

One thing you could do is to let your construction workers take a ferry or freighter to the other side of the island. That wouldn't slow down speed much because you already have freighters in the game.

[Kuplo]

I really dont think that having a few busses on the island would slow down the game anymore than it already is.  As it is now, when I get a population count of around 350 or so, they jump around like jumping beans on the closest zoom, I tolerate that.

I think that if you allowed only a certain amount, say 5 busses in all, it really wouldn't slow down the game if coded correctly. and could only serve to improve the game.

If you had a total of 5 busses that had to run a route, it could work out quite nicely, for me all I would need really is like 2 busses, one that transports from my starting city to the tourist resort side of the island, and one back to the other side, so running 2 in concession would actually do it.  Then though if I really wanted to, I could have 1 go to the top of a hill where a gold mine is, maybe one more from the tourist area to the overlook area.  But I really dont think it would slow down the game, but I do think it would take quite a bit of programming to integrate it into the game with whats already there.

Im certainly not holding my breath waiting for PT to implement mass transport in the game, but I'd be as happy as a hog in slop if they did put it into a patch or addon, and would actually play the game, and be able to play the game the way I want to play it instead of how the developers envisioned me playing the game.