Chapter 2 - Campaign Walkthrough
The campaign forms a big part of Tropico 2: Pirate Cove. It is similar to a tutorial in helping you develop your skills in the various aspects of
of game play. So I highly recommend that you play through at least the first few episodes of the campaign before reading this walkthrough or trying some of the more difficult
scenarios to get a feel for how things work. But once you have gone through the campaign or at least tried some of the episodes, you may be looking for ways to do it better,
so here are some tips on how the campaign episodes work and how to best achieve a good score.
But remember that the idea of the campaign is to learn and have fun, so feel free to ignore these suggestions and experiment with other things to see how they work. You may not get the gold medal, but will learn a lot more doing it.
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Episode 1 - Beer for Buccaneers
| Start Date: | Jan. 1650 |
| End Date: | Jan. 1651 |
| Resources: | 250 gold, 17 lumber |
| Goals: | Build a brewery and a smuggler's dive. |
| Bronze: | Complete within 13 months. |
| Silver: | Complete within 6 months. |
| Gold: | Complete within 4 months. |
Notes:
This introductory episode is so easy that they even have the locations marked for where to put down your buildings.
Start by placing a timber camp behind the sawmill and then build a construction tent across the road from the rectangular brown pad near the beach
and another one close to the square pad near the chuck tent. Then place either your brewery on the square pad or the smuggler's cove
on the rectangular pad near the beach. If you paused the game at the start, which I usually recommended to get your bearings, unpause the game now.
While waiting for your lumber to build up, check your sawmill and timber camp to be sure they are fully staffed and if not, set them to medium or high priority.
Keep an eye on your lumber stockpile count at the bottom left of the screen. If you want to be ready, select the building you want to build and hold it over the
chosen location. It will turn green when you have enough lumber. By around March 1, you should have enough lumber for the other building so place it.
If you've done everything right, you should be done before the end of March, well within the four months needed for a gold!
Tips:
This episode teaches that it is a good idea to set up two or three construction tents at the start of a game to
speed up your early construction. Usually there are enough captives to staff these fully until you get more buildings up.
Then when you need to staff the new buildings, fire the appropriate male or female captives from your construction tents by shift-clicking on them.
This is also a good time to understand the staffing priorities for buildings. If you set a building to medium or high
priority, captives will staff that building first and any available pirates will also be attracted to work as overseers to speed
up the workers.
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Episode 2 - Pirate Industry
| Start Date: | Nov. 1650 |
| End Date: | May. 1652 |
| Resources: | 500 gold, 8 lumber |
| Goals: | Build one each of a sea ration factory, iron mine, blast furnace, blacksmithy and a dock. |
| Bronze: | Complete within 18.7 months. |
| Silver: | Complete within 14.8 months. |
| Gold: | Complete within 13.1 months. |
Notes:
This island is the same one you were on for episode 1 but may look a little different than yours since a new pre-made map is used.
Start by building a construction tent near the smuggler's dive and build a dock at the end of the road near the scary skeleton hands.
Set your sawmill and timber camp to high priority to get an overseer and ensure maximum staffing. Unpause if you haven't already. Build a second or third
construction tent near the stockade as you get more captives from shipwrecks. When you have 10 lumber, build either the sea ration factory across the road
from the palace or an iron mine near the ore deposit behind the palace. Remember that you should always place a mine beside the green ore area,
never on top of it, since that is the richest deposit. Then build the other of these two when you have 10 more lumber. Finally, build the blast
furnace and blacksmithy as you gain enough lumber for them. It is tempting to build the blacksmithy before the blast furnace since it uses less lumber,
but it is best to build them in the proper order to get the iron production chain up and running sooner. You should be able to finish around August, 1651,
well ahead of the time needed for a gold medal.
Tips:
On Placing Docks: Docks are a special type of building that must be placed in a certain orientation to be built. You can rotate the
dock with the rotation button below the graphic in the construction menu. To be placed, the dock must have its ramp side towards a sandy beach and within 8 cells of a road
and the wharf side towards the water. A yellow road will appear where the road will be built to connect it to an existing road. This will not always be where
you want it to be, so you may want to build a road closer to the shore first. If the dock does not turn green, meaning a suitable place has been found, try
rotating it to another orientation, building a road closer to shore or looking for a different site along the shore.
On the Iron Industry: The manual recommends that you place your iron industry buildings in order towards the dock area, so that as iron is turned to pig iron
and then cutlasses or other weapons, it is also moving closer to the docks. I have also found that in the long term you need at least two iron mines per blast furnace to
satisfy the insatiable demand for iron since each step consumes two of the preceding commodity, i.e. two iron to produce one pig iron, two pig iron to
produce one cutlass or musket.
On Gender Issues: If you check your stockade for available workers as Smitty recommends, you may find that early in the game, you have buildings with no
staff but several workers wearing red shirts in the stockade. This is because some jobs are only for women and some only for men. The default job uniform
for unemployed captives is the hauler outfit, which is red for women and grey for men. So if you have women available for work and unfilled openings for men,
you should fire some men (shift-click on them) from jobs which use both men and women like the construction builder or farmer. Then they will fill the empty slots and the available
women will take their place. You may need to set the priority of the unstaffed buildings to medium or high to make sure the fired workers go there.
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Episode 3 - Raiders of the Caribbean
| Start Date: | Jan. 1652 |
| End Date: | Jan. 1656 |
| Resources: | 500 gold, 15 lumber |
| Goals: | Build a boatyard and get your treasury up to at least 3000 gold pieces. |
| Bronze: | Complete within 4 years. |
| Silver: | Complete within 1 year and 9 months. |
| Gold: | Complete within 12.5 months. |
Notes:
The first task for this episode is to build the boatyard. This is a little tricky because there is no place for it with the
roads and shoreline existing at startup. Like a dock, a boatyard must be built next to water and a sandy beach, but on land rather than on the water
like the dock. It also must be next to a road like all other buildings and will not build its own road as the dock will. The best place for a dock on this map
is the small patch of beach to the southwest of the stockade, since this will save room by the current dock for another one.
It is usually a good idea to build your boatyard somewhere away from the regular docks and pirate entertainment area to keep your shipwright from thinking of escaping
and to leave more room for docks close to your entertainment area.
To build your boatyard, first extend the road from in front of the stockade right down almost to the small beach area. Then you should
be able to build the boatyard so it is touching both the road and shoreline. Orientation does not matter for a boatyard, but I have noticed that the shipwright
enters on the side with the large woodshed building, so I usually place that closest to the road. Of course, as Smitty will remind you, you also need
to place a construction tent somewhere near the stockade to get construction going.
Now you should check around your buildings to make sure they are staffed properly. This is a good time to use the overlay function. Click the
eye icon and select the rightmost button for structures. Click the middle bottom graphic for Staff Size and your buildings will be shown in shades of
green and red depending on their staffing. Note that your timber camp likely has few or no workers at this point since it is so far from the stockade.
Captives like to fill closer positions first rather than walking too far. To get some workers there, set their staff priority to medium or high and
then fire some workers from the blacksmithy or blast furnace since they will have no iron yet to work with anyway.
Now it's time to do some sailing. You should have four pirates, enough to sail a ship, so ignore Smitty's advice to start press ganging
captives for now. As soon as your ship has a full load of rations, choose the Raid Settlement ship orders and press the button to Set Sail. While waiting
for its return, you may want to consider your next building. I recommend a corn farm near the sea ration factory to keep it supplied. Then try
building some pirate entertainment buildings near the dock. Your ship should be returning shortly with some new captives. If you lose a pirate or two
from raiding, you will have to press-gang some captives to become pirates. Do this from the edicts menu for Individual Attention and enact the press gang edict.
The easiest way to choose captives at this stage is to check your buildings starting at the stockade for idle workers, then buildings that have lowest
priority or multiple workers like farms or construction tents. Make sure you hold down the ctrl key when you click on the
captive so that you can continue press-ganging additional captives without re-enacting the edict.
When your ship is full of rations and pirates, send it off again for another raiding mission to replenish your captives. You should also have
some shipwrecked captives coming in by now, so soon it will be time for your first cruise. Click the telescope icon to view the strategic map and see
where your ship is set to sail. Your initial location is the Lesser Antilles and this is fine for cruising as it has a French settlement and an English
trade route to provide victims. Before cruising, you should also decide where to set the division of spoils setting for your crew. If you're going for the gold and want to send the maximum amount
to your treasury to win early, set this to Miserly or Selfish. If you want to attract more pirate recruits and/or give your pirates lots of money to spend on entertainment, leave it on Big Spender or Generous.
When your ship is ready to sail again, this time leave it on cruise orders and set sail. Your ship should by now have a
full load of cutlasses but if you have lost any along the way, you will have to wait for your iron industry to get in full gear to replenish them.
As soon as you start cruising, you will be exposed to one of the biggest problems of pirating, losing your ship. Here's where autosave and quicksave are your
biggest friends, unless you consider that cheating. Always hit Q to make a quick save of your game before sending out a ship so you can recover from there
if it sinks. In this episode, it is almost impossible to achieve gold if your first ship sinks unless you really do well in your cruising.
However, if you want to plan ahead and play honestly, you will eventually need to build a ship to replace your first one. Click on your boatyard and
select a ship to build if you have enough gold and lumber. You will note that if you still have your first ship, you cannot build another one until you have
a second dock. Build a dock next to the first one and block out the hauler positions so that your regular ship will not dock there and to keep it from stealing
all the available supplies. Now build the ship when you meet the requirements. You can eventually open up the hauler slots at the second dock if your first dock is well-supplied or if you do lose your first ship.
Now it's simply a matter of cruising repeatedly for loot and hoping for a good haul. If you get any wealthy captives, you should ransom them right away to get the loot quickly. Later on in other games when you have lots of entertainment
facilities, you can let them stay around and build up their ransom value on credit. If you are lucky, you can win the gold by getting your treasury over 3000 by the beginning of 1653. If not, keep on cruising until you do.
Tips:
On Ransoming: The best way to ransom wealthy captives, especially in a longer game, is to first enact the edict, then click the
population counter at the bottom right of the screen to bring up the demographics page of the log book. Click the captives link on the left page to bring
up the captives page. If you have only a few wealthy captives and want to ransom them right away, you can just ctrl-click them right in this page. But if you
have a lot and want to ransom only the ones with the highest ransom, click the link for Ransom just below the wealthy captives to open the page showing all
wealthy captives sorted by ransom. Ctrl-click until you have ransomed all you want.
On Press-Ganging: You can do a similar trick when press-ganging captives to be pirates. First enact the press-gang edict, then
open the demographics page, click on the captives link, and this time select the courage link. You can then select the most courageous captives as your recruits and
this will make your pirates more likely to keep fighting in a battle and not flee to the hold of the ship, so can have a positive impact on your sea battles.
Of course, you can also select other traits like leadership, but these may not have as much of an effect on your battles.
On Ship Repairing: You may notice that sometimes after a cruise, you cannot send your ship out right away because it indicates it is being repaired
in the ship status window. If you move the cursor over this message, the hover help will indicate what percentage the ship repair is at. Repairing also takes
lumber so a small amount will be deducted from your stockpile and if you have no stockpile, the repairs may be delayed.
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Episode 4 - Privateers, not Pirates
| Start Date: | April 1655 |
| End Date: | April 1660 |
| Resources: | 3000 gold, 12 lumber |
| Goals: | Build one sloop for Henry Morgan and achieve a pirate happiness level greater than 62.5%. |
| Bronze: | Complete within 5 years. |
| Silver: | Complete within 2 years and 9 months. |
| Gold: | Complete within 2 years. |
Notes:
Start by building a timber camp next to the sawmill. Some good choices to build next are a couple of corn farms across from your palace
and stockade, since you only start with one farm. Of course you will also need a construction tent in the area of the stockade. Another good choice is to build a second sawmill and timber camp early on to increase the rate of lumber accumulation.
Your first shipping task will be to kidnap a shipwright. Select the Kidnap Craftsman orders on your ship and pick the shipwright from the list. Set sail as
soon as you have enough rations. Next you may want to raid a settement to get your captive count up. When you get tired of raiding or have enough captives,
kidnap a skilled cook and skilled wench to allow more entertainment buildings. Don't bother with Smitty's advice to kidnap a skilled farmer and priest
as you will not likely have much benefit from them in this short scenario.
Once you have a shipwright and ten lumber, build your boatyard as soon as possible. Again, I recommend keeping it away from your docks. A good
location is to build a road to the northwest just below the initial corn farm far enough to be parallel with the straight beach area. Your boatyard should
just fit between this road and the beach. Don't forget to put down another construction tent nearby and encourage workers there by firing them from your first
construction tent if workers are in short supply. Your next build should be a dock to allow you to start building ships and a brewery to get the grog flowing.
By now, your pirates may be getting restless, as you can see by the orange bar on the left dropping. Time to build some entertainment! First build a
cross road a few cells up from your dock to give you room to spread the buildings out. Then build a dive, animal pit and a few wench houses. Keep up the
raiding as long as you need more workers, but give your pirates some shore time once some entertainment buildings are completed. Remember to check your
stockade for excess workers and sort out any gender issues. You will need to free up some female workers to staff your entertainment buildings.
The iron industry is optional in this episode as you likely won't need to do any cruising, but if you want to, build a road next to the sea ration
factory leading to the ore deposit and build a mine, blast furnace and blacksmithy. A better choice may be to build a second sawmill if you haven't already done so.
About a year into the game you should be ready to start building your sloop so hold off on any building to allow your lumber stockpile to build up to 50 lumber.
Once your sloop is underway, you will need to concentrate on increasing your pirate's happiness. Build more entertainment buildings as needed to meet their needs.
If you still have money in the treasury, consider passing an edict for free beer, a pirate festival or donating money to a ship
or to individual pirates. Once you have enough entertainment structures, you should also build some defence or anarchy structures to make your pirates
feel better defended. You should be well on your way to victory now, hopefully a gold before April 1657.
Tips:
On Pirate Happiness: You can easily check individual pirate's needs
by first clicking on any pirate in a ship and selecting the overview button (first button on the left) to see his/her needs. Then click the orange bar
on the left of the screen to open the pirate happiness page. Click on each pirate in turn to see their individual needs in the bottom status screen.
Also check the graph for any areas that are especially low. Unfortunately, pirate houses are not
enabled in this scenario, so hoarding and resting may be low for all pirates.
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