Tropico 6 Lets You Literally Steal World Wonders from Rival Nations

There’s a pleasing serenity to most city-building games. You construct this grand terrarium where citizens work and play. Over here is the factory district, and over there is a residential area with a school and a verdant park. Busses chug along thoughtfully laid out roads, getting folks where they need to go. You can’t help but be proud. Tropico 6 provides this experience, and powered by Unreal Engine 4, it looks more handsome than ever before. It also lets you airlift the Taj Mahal out of India and plop it right down in the middle of main street.

The Tropico series’ madcap bent has always set it apart from other city-builders, and Tropico 6 provides the player with even more extravagant methods for shaping the banana republic of their dreams. The big one in this latest addition is the new raid mechanic, which lets you enrich your island nation through an array of rival-bamboozling schemes. Citing series protagonist El Presidente’s “wildly mischievous edge,” Limbic Entertainment’s Senior Content Designer Johannes Pfeifer told us, “It only makes sense that he not only influences Tropico but messes around with the affairs of other nations as well.”

As you move through Tropico 6’s four eras, you will have the option to construct unique, increasingly useful buildings that produce Raid Points, which can then be spent on wreaking various forms of productive havoc. The Colonial Era’s Pirate Cove, for instance, allows you to launch plundering missions that net you population boosts and valuable resources. This is as much a tool as a thrill, a catch-up mechanism you can use to get your civilization back on track. “Struggling to build up an industry or farm a specific resource, or just don’t feel like it?” Pfeifer explains. “Well, you can send your pirates out to plunder it for you instead.”

The splashiest raids, the ones in which you make off in the middle of the night with a famous historical monument, don’t just add a beautiful tourist attraction to your city. They also provide powerful, game-altering rewards. For example, if you’ve built a few too many smoke-belching rum distilleries, you might want to look into swiping Stonehenge, which helps reforest the surrounding area and reduces island-wide pollution.

“There are 17 world wonders in the game,” Pfeifer says, “ranging from classic ancient monuments like the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Roman Colosseum, to more modern buildings like the White House and the Winter Palace.”

The nation of Tropico itself is more expansive in Tropico 6. Rather than controlling a single island, El Presidente presides over a variety of vast archipelagos that provide some interesting challenges as you build out from the city center. Iron mines on one island need to be connected to steel factories on another; workers need to be able to get to their jobs without scuba gear. Fortunately, there are new bridge-building mechanics for this, and you can break up inter-island bottlenecks with robust train networks, bus systems, and, more whimsically, fleets of cable cars.

If smart infrastructure planning is a means of keeping Tropico thriving, you also need levers that help you consolidate your power over it. “The player is in control of everything that’s going on in Tropico,” Pfeifer explains. “From setting the budgets of individual buildings, to issuing special edicts like double work shifts or subsidizing rents, or drafting a constitution that impacts on what is and isn’t allowed.”

Your substantial control, of course, is only as useful as your ability to read your citizens. The double work shifts edict can be a lifesaver when you’re trying to goose production in order to fulfill a trade deal, but if Tropicans are already grouchy about a housing shortage, they’re liable to call for your head.

Among the many political tools available to you, the Broker is a helpful new one. He allows El Presidente to use his personal Swiss Bank slush fund to finance drastic short-term projects. If you want to recruit a literal boatload of college-educated people or require a last-minute image campaign to boost your approval rating before an election, the Broker’s your man. He’s the kind of unscrupulous adviser you need to be the best power-drunk despot you can be.

There is currently a beta available for all PC users who pre-order Tropico 6. Even in its pre-release state, there’s a lot of content, including a handful of maps from the game’s campaign and multiplayer, for players to dive into ahead of the game’s March 29th release.