Playtesters wanted for new scenarios

[loverevolutionary]

Hi, loverevolutionary here (or Seth IRL.)  I'm new to this forum and relatively new to Tropico.  I've fallen in love with scripting, and have made some scenarios I need help with.  Specifically, I need help deciding what difficulty level each of them really is, and some suggestions for appropriate goals for each.

I have four scenarios I have been working on.  Most of them have at least 20 events, and several do some  novel things with the game engine.  If people express an interest, I will upload what I have finished for testing and comments.

My first scenario, Distant Dreams, follows the wacky exploits of a womanizing pop star who wants to make his distant little island into a tourist mecca.

The next scenario I worked on (and the least finished: it's more of a choose-your-own-adventure story than a game) is called Ancient Ways.  It's kind of spooky and mysterious, set on an Island with a haunted past.  There will eventually be a murder-mystery plotline in it, but I haven't finished it.

I got tired of never having any rebels to fight (I'm a softy and always pay my people well...) So I designed my next scenario, Independance, around an island that has just won it's independance from an evil neighboring island, Traffico (guess what the Trafficans are famous for...)  This scenario is one of my favorites to play: the threat level can grow pretty fierce, I've had two army bases fully staffed and a critical threat level in this one.

I've saved the best for last:  Vayase, Touristas.  You start with an airport, casino, pub and hotel.  Pretty easy, huh?  Well, your people HATE tourists.  You have the choice of fulfilling your people's wishes by building an industrial economy and shunning tourism, keeping a small tourist industry and suffering minor annoyance, or building your big tourist start into a tourist mecca and risking all out revolution.  This one puts the MessageTypeBottomRight to good use: watch as your poor maids and attendants get individually harrased by tourists.  You'll either watch them flee your tourist traps in droves, pay them well enough to suffer such insults, or find a way to change their minds about tourism.

So, would anyone like to help me out by playing these through and offering suggestions, comments, criticism, and ideas about difficulty level and goals?

[Marlow]

I'll go for it. Send them to me @ Marlow@antisocial.com. I can help try to find bugs and typos, but use someone else for difficulty judging.

[loverevolutionary]

1 reply and 7 views!  As a newbie to this board, I count that as enough interest to bother posting my two most complete scenarios, "Independance" and "Vayase, Touristas." So here is the first.

[loverevolutionary]

And here is the second, and my current favorite, "Vayase, Touristas."

[Cam]

Can't wait to get stuck into them ... thanks for making these available! You've come up with some really compelling ideas, and I look forward to seeing your other scenarios come to fruition.  

[nSh]

i would like to play them 2, as soon as i wil get PI i will do it  

[loverevolutionary]

Here is a third scenario.  "Distant Dreams" has a lot of events, but is only half finished (and some of the events currently in it will be altered as soon as I come up with better ideas.)  As it stands, it has a few amusing choices and an interesting, long running sub-plot.  In the end, almost every tourist building will have a wacky promotion associated with it.  You get to decide which, if any, of the ideas might be money makers and which are too risky, or just plain too stupid.

[loverevolutionary]

And here is "Ancient Ways" even though this one isn't even a tenth of the way done.  I plan to have over 100 events in this script, but most of them are just story, with no game effects.  One interesting thing I use in this scenario is an alternate religious system for the non-religious.  Wonder why no one is going to church?  You'll find out, mwah-hah-hah!

If anyone is interested, I had an idea of turning this one into a collaborative project, each person would read the scripts, then write a couple more years worth of story and pass it on.

Email me if interested.

[loverevolutionary]

Grrr. If you preview a post with an attachement, even though it lists the attachement under the post, it doesn't upload it unless you re-attach it?  Anyway, here it is

[Cam]

Seth IRL / LR,

Thanks once more for your efforts.

I downloaded 'Indy', however the game gave me three errors relating to your scripts;

'EndReb' - line 5
'Busted' - line 8
'Crushed' - line 10

I didn't take it any further.

I also downloded 'Vayase', and comments I'll proffer;

I felt that the player needed to be advised of the duration of the game (I played for just over 50 years but gave up after the game went into the 2000's),

I personally like to try to 'beat' scenarios by having a target score rather than an open-ended score (OK ... it's just my preference) unless it's a community contest.

As for difficulty, I'm not sure how you would rate it as you haven't put forward any goals, however I noted that the scenario did have a pretty tough level of political difficulty (I guess 'hard'), and as such with a challenging target, 'moderate' to 'hard' would seem to be reasonable.

For your interest, my first attempt had the following (approximated) scores;

1980: 1,600 points
1990: 2,250 points
2000: 2,850 points

Given that I'd not played this scenario before, and I had some severe dock worker difficulties in the early part of the game, I would imagine that these scores are a little low.

For your info', the game progressed with;

Russian trade mission at the start gave me a +60% rum premium, so I went after sugar with a view to a distillery as a priority. Other industries included tobacco>cigars and coffee>canned>freeze dried. I also went after logs>lumber>furniture from the 1980's.

I also moved quickly at the start towards a second Hotel, but kept tourism workers to a low level - I think 12 was my maximum.

I kept cheating on elections, and got to the point of implementing Marshall Law by the mid-70's. I was slow to get an Army Base up, which was a bit of a problem for a while. More or less my soldiers went one-for-one with the rebels - towards the end I had 14 rebels on the island and 16 available soldier spots. I had about five coups, but they were all snuffed out, and despite several 'arrest' edicts, the disloyal soldiers always lost their fight before I could get the cuffs on them. Liberty got as low as 21.  

Thanks once more - I hope some of these comments are of value. I 'peeked' at the scripting at one point to see if there indeed was a scripted game-end point, and noted the complexity of the scenario.

[loverevolutionary]

Sorry for the bugs.  I thought I had fixed those.  Here's the bug free version.  Try to shoot for an armory, modernized army base and at least 4 guard shacks by 1970 if you don't like rowing.

[loverevolutionary]

Let me clarify what kind of advice I'm looking for, and why there are no win conditions in any of my scenarios.

I want Independance and Vayase Touristas to be very hard or ridiculously hard.  With Distant Dreams, I'm looking for some goals that people would find moderately hard.  With Ancient Ways, the difficulty should be insane unless you find the secret to resurecting zombie workers, in which case it should be easy.

Thanks again to Cam for the advice.  The reason I set Vayase to 70 years was so I could do three different goals, depending on choices.  One would be short term, like building a tourist empire and getting out in 30 years.  One would be medium term, say, building an economy worth over $2,000,000 in buildings and treasury in 50 years.  Finally, near the end I wanted to give the option of extending the game 20 more years but requiring a hefty balance in the swiss account at the end to win.

[loverevolutionary]

Here is "Independance" with the last bug (I hope) fixed.  Ran afoul of the 8 character event name problem.   Now you should get a big celebration plus a game score bonus if you completely crush the invasion.

Another hint: You need tourist dollars to guarantee enough money to both fight off the invasion and keep your people happy enough to keep winning UN-inspected elections.  You can't afford a profitless year during an election.  The map has room for an airport very close to the starting location.  It also has a little isthamus that is perfect for a couple hotels and tourist attractions.

[loverevolutionary]

Here is an updated version of Independance, with an almanac score page and win/lose conditions.

You now need to achieve $1,000,000 in combined building and treasury value with an overall happiness of 65 in fifty years.  

Oh, and fight off an invasion of 10-40 rebels.  The length and severity are mostly random, but can be effected by choices in the game.

If this doesn't prove impossibly difficult, I'll upload it to the user scenario area.

[Cam]

loverevolutionary,

A few last minute observations ...

In 'Indy4', the almanac page shows the clock progressing forward rather than backwards (or vice versa   ) in that it starts at 50 years, and says something to the effect that the player has # years remaining. That is, after 10 years of game play, the almanac score page advises 60 rather than 40 years remaining.

The combined worth of 'cash + building value' could possibly be expressed in a currency format.

The difficulty rating at the start / opening menu needs amending to (at least) 'hard' I would suggest (although I'm terrible at keeping happiness above about '47' and games with fair elections are always a real headache for me!).

Thanks once more for a really challenging game.  

[loverevolutionary]

Wacky.  This expression doesn't work:

GeneralEffect SetTo EventVariable1 (50-YearsElapsed)

Because YearsElapsed is evidently negative.  Here's how they do it in the official scenarios:

GeneralEffect SetTo EventVariable1 (50-(YearsElapsed*-1))

I'll change the listed difficulty in a bit.

[timp999]

Why not just do (50+YearsElapsed)? If it's a negative value, adding it will effectively subtract it for you.

PoPToP, if you're not gonna do any more work on the Tropico game, please give us back the DEBUG mode...

[loverevolutionary]

You got me, Timp.  I just assumed they did it the bass ackwards way for a reason.  Maybe their interpreter isn't capable of adding negative numbers, only subtracting positive?

[Che Guevera]

Hey, I'm  just downloadind your scenarios. I'll play them and get back to you with difficulty ratings and what i think. If you want i can post them on my new web site Tropico World which will be online soon. If your interested reply.

[Che Guevera]

 :)Hey I played Vayase Tourista. It is a brilliant scenario, but there are some flaws:
1. Not enough events.
2. The game seened to never end

I started by having to close the airport to power the casino, and i raised everybody's wages to keep them happy, cos they weren't very happy that i added 2 new hotels. It all started to go down hill, and i was in a lot of debt, but i saved and added a couple of gold mines and the economy started to boom. The US sent a gunboat out as i was trying to become friends with the soviets and in the late 90's they invaded the island. dadgumed yanqui's.

Overall a brilliant piece of work, can't wait to play Indy and Ancient. Also I am asking your permission to publish these on my web site.

P.S. Were there any real goals to that scenario?
 

[loverevolutionary]

There are goals in "Vayase, Touristas" now, two in fact.   And more events.  Of course, certain events like "annoy" can fire literally hundreds of times.  Many of the events work behind the scenes, so to speak.  Rather than giving players choices through events, this scenario lets players use in-game tools like newspapers and edicts to influence events.

You now have until 1980 to bring in $500,000 in tourism.  If you set off mass protests and rebellion doing so, you them have the option of changing goals to combined $1,000,000 in buildings and treasury plus $100,000 in your Swiss Account by 2000, with NO tourism allowed.

Here is the latest version: Vayase, Touristas 1.1.  Thanks to CafeDave, Cam, and everyone who has helped out with comments and suggestions.

[loverevolutionary]

Well, I finished playetesting the v1.1.  Sigh.  It's too easy if you enact the food for the people edict and are used to hard political difficulty.  I never cheated a single election, and won each handily.  I hit $500,000 7 years early, in 1973.  35 tourism workers can... MAKE MONEY FAST!   I never had to bring on a revolution.  

So, I added the option of changing goals by reducing tourism to 0.  You can still have tourism workers, just no tourists.  Do this any year after 1955 to change goals.

Gah!  Glad I double checked things before uploading that file.  Sigh.  Bugs, bugs, bugs. After more testing, I think it works.  Playing a low-tourism game is MUCH harder.  I had one election that was too close to call.  I won fairly, but it was a toss up.  I lost the game in 1980 because I couldn't get the tourists out fast enough to switch.   Hint: start laying off workers before 1977, tourists stick around for years.  I was well on my way to building a kickin' industrial economy, though.  I had a cigar factory, mill and furniture factory, and a suger mill under construction.  I had both the cigar and rum subsidies.   The last election was a 65%'er.  

This thing is tricky, because the only way to get a high score out of it is to go the second route.  The tourism route is easy if you know how to leverage your assets and keep your people happy.  I mean you start with a hotel, casino, pub, power plant, airport, a tenement, an apartment and some houses.  It's a mini tourist mecca from the git-go.

Anyway, it's late and I'm babbling.  Here's the latest.  I think I've finally watched every event in it work right.  I hope so because I want to finish the Uncle Duke (from Doonsbury) scenario.  

I haven't played a selfish capitalist, cia installed, paranoid wacko before.  It should be a fun one.  Thanks to Jiimcat for the idea and very astute characterization of Duke in game terms (developer, installed by cia, entreprenurial, sociable, paranoid, coward.  The goal will be to launder $500,000 in cia drugs-for-arms money through off-shore banking by 1990.  Not that that ever really happened.    ) Jimcat also came up with some great event ideas based on the comic.

I hereby give permission for anyone to publish my scenarios anywhere on the web as long as you email the URL to my loverevolutionary account at yahoo.

[Che Guevera]

Hey again. I played Indy, it's brilliant aswell, i like the drug theme there. I didn't actually choose to grow the coca, but i had a look at the events and i'm glad i didn't. I've just downloaded vayase12, so ill playtest it and get back to you. Also I will publish Vayase and Indy on my website soon, when i get a chance to publish it. I will send the url as soon as pos.

[Che Guevera]

Vayase Tourista is certainly a lot better now. I tried the route of no tourism at all, the people were much, much happier for a while. It is really challenging though if you take the no tourism route. Also if you choose the mining option near the start I would advise you to build some gold mines, the output stores rapidly increase. I had like two mines and there outputs throughout the game were at like 15-30, plus they were near the coast and 3 jewellery factories, with 5 teamsters offices around! Quite easy to make a million, but it's getting that 100K in your swiss account that's harder.

I also tried something that you suggested in a previous post of adding terraces for farming. I added a few in the scenario I'm working on, the same with the cow bowls. They work a treat my papaya yields were sky high, and they stayed that way.I am looking forward to some more scenarios that you are working on.

[loverevolutionary]

I'm glad you found a way to beat the game with no tourism.  I still haven't done it.  The tourism win seems too easy, though: I had $475,000 in tourism revenue by 1980 only building 1 extra hotel, a beach site and a scenic viewpoint!  I took the tourism boost, which helps.

The problem is, I was thinking net income, not revenue.  I'm changing the first goal to $500,000 by 1975.

I was going to change the second goal to make it easier, but maybe I don't need to.  I build great tourist economies, but I have more to learn about industrial economies, so I'm not the best judge of how difficult the second goal is.

Maybe I'll change the Swiss Bank goal to $50,000 and see how that works.

I like the fact that players don't find out what the second goal is until they risk a rebellion or reduce tourism to 0.  I like to build scenarios that offer player game choices rather than just scripted choices.  By game choices I mean, for instance, how the player has to do domething in the game to bring about the goal change option, rather than just answering a scripted question.

Similarly, there are no scripted choices that will modify how often maids and attendents get annoyed, but there is a hint that might help you figure out ways of reducing the annoyance through buildings and edicts.

Another option, and one I plan on using in the Uncle Duke scenario, is the idea of offering the player a hint that if they build certain combinations of buildings, they may be able to do unique things with the combination.

One more way of offering in game choices would be time-limited subgoals.  In one of my scenarios, as soon as you build a Diplomatic Ministry, the US wants a secret airbase on your island.  Rather than just give you an airport and alert the whole world to their intentions, they ask if you are willing to build it for them, quickly.  If so, you get a bunch of money.  First, they say you have to enact the development aid edict within a year.  (if you were hoping that diplomatic ministry was gonna help you build cheap housing, tough titties) If you do, they then give you some more money and tell you you have to build the airport within five years, or else!  And they mention how their big transport planes produce a lot of pollution.  Hehe.  If you miss a deadline, they send some rebels to destabilize your regime.

To me, choices like these are more interesting than "Do you want a free power plant or a better mining rate?" type of questions.