Every level/map in Tropico 3 follows the same pattern:

STAGE 1: Look at the resources on the map. Get a sense of what industries to build (I personally never build furniture factories). Have an idea where everything is so you can come back to them later. For now, only build the buildings that hire the uneducated – mines, farms, garages, teamsters, ranches. There is no point expanding beyond that (for example by building an oil refinery or a clinic or a church) because you won't have the skilled workers to run them. I always build two or three Construction Offices as well. This stage can seem slow to pass as money is so tight so I like to lay my road system for the entire island during this stage to pass the time. I will build advanced buildings, work out how the road will connect to them and then delete the building.

Also, from the very start, build a diplomatic ministry and get the USSR Development edict. This reduces the costs of tenements and apartments by half which will save you a lot of money. You need to do this as quickly as possible when starting a game as if you don't, the Communists soon become unhappy with you due to the lack of housing/clinics and perversely you are then denied the edict which means you then have to spend a lot of money on full-priced housing to get back into their good books. Don't fall into that trap.

STAGE 2: Scrape together the cash to build a high school and college. Hire a foreign expert in for each and pay them a higher wage so they don't change jobs. Use the Literacy Program edict. You can now build factories and other such buildings that require educated workers. A grade school or two is not vital and doesn't visibly improve anything but I think is useful to have nonetheless.

STAGE 3: Build a power plant to get all the factory/building upgrades that require electricity. I build it somewhere remote and then build stations to expand the grid. Build one wind turbine to make the environmentalists happy - you'd need a lot of money to power the entire island that way though.

STAGE 4: Keep on going until the time runs out – but watch out for an economic slump. This is what happens when you focus too much on making your people happy and not enough on making money. With an advanced economy, you will find the wage bill is crippling and to maintain profits, you will need new areas of revenue or to cut your costs (much like real life). A good trick is when you raise your peoples wages, charge them extra for their rent. Entertainment buildings are profitable too - give people the opportunity to spend their wages. The Industry Ad Campaign edict is very good as it increases the price of your export goods but needs a TV station.


ROADS:

For my first few games, I used to build single roads that connected up my buildings from one side of the map to the other. This was fine until the population got to around 400 and then the volume of traffic all on that one road would really slow everything down. Don't build single roads, build several roads so cars have alternative ways of getting around. My roads generally hug the beach/mountains with connecting roads in-between. The intention is to avoid the choke points that will appear where everyone is being funnelled down one particular stretch of road – causing massive delays which will eventually destroy your economy. Don't build crossroads - they slow traffic down.

Building roads can be strangely annoying. The game has a very irritating habit of taunting you by showing you how you'd like roads to link up but preventing you from doing so. By far the trickiest thing however is building roads that go up the sides of hills. On some maps it is deliberately, totally impossible but most of the time it can be done. The tactic I often use is to build a road slowly, bit by bit. As the road advances, it flattens the land down allowing you to then build the next bit. But not always, often you have to delete and start again. Other times I build a shack which again flattens the land and find you can now build a road there. Use the ALT key rotation to see from the ground eye view exactly what the problem is – usually a very steep incline. Building roads can be a total nightmare so if at first you don't succeed, give up and try again later.


GARAGES:

There are two types of building in Tropico - those that have their own built-in garages and those that don't. The buildings that have garages can function much more independently as people can drive to and from the building. Every other building that doesn't have its own garage needs to be near one! It is a very important building as this is how most people get around. Build a lot of them! I plan all the other buildings around them, usually by placing apartments and popular buildings very near to a garage. Build them off the main roads in a side road of their own as otherwise it will create traffic problems later. When establishing yourself in a new area of the map, build a garage as your highest priority, otherwise your workers will have a long walk home.


FARMS / TEAMSTERS / GARAGES TRIANGLE:

It took me a while to work this out. Basically build your farm next to (not on top of) a fertile patch of land. The farmers grow the food and that's all they do. A teamster will be dropped off at the farm and they will wheelbarrow away the goods on foot and the closer they are to a garage means the quicker they are able to get into a truck and drive the food to a market/dockyard. For ages I was playing the game assuming the teamsters drove the food straight from the farm. I must have thought that after seeing this happen with a mine but the important difference is that a mine has a built-in garage of its own whereas factories (with the sole exception of the jewellery factory) and farms do not. One farm feeds fifty Tropicans.


WAGES:

I was puzzled for a quite a while as to how the wages panel worked. There are three buttons on the wage panel. To hire foreign experts is obvious enough but the purpose of the other two puzzled me as I'd click on them and nothing seemed to happen. Firstly you must set the wage level using the slider above. That is what the people in that one specific building are now being paid. The other two buttons are how you apply that wage level to other buildings/people. You click once on them and the wage level you just set is now applied to either all the workers in the same industry or to all the workers of the same educational level. The tooltip will tell you which is which.

I pay my workers like this: I immediately raise my uneducated rate to 6 to get people to come to Tropico. Then high school workers get 12 and college workers get 18. You will see the average Caribbean wage in the almanac. If your nation's average wage is lower, then raise everybody's wage by 1 at a time to keep up.

When I'm well into the game I also raise the rent costs. I find the wealthier people can afford the increase but if you see the poor abandoning the tenements for shacks then you know you've raised the rent too high.

REMEMBER:

In considering where to put buildings, realise that ideally teamsters go to your farms, pick up the raw materials, drive to your factories, drop off the raw materials and while they are there, pick up the processed goods and drive them to the dock. So, build your factories at a location that is in-between your farm and the dock. If the factory is on the other side of the island that is a long, wasteful detour. I generally build my factory district very close to the dock area. You know you have become a confident city planner when you decide to destroy the pre-existing dock and build one in your own preferred location instead (or you can keep both, that's up to you).

Keep an eye on your Unemployed/Free Job Positions tally. There is no point building if there aren't enough people around to run them. It's tempting when you have money to always keep building but sometimes you just have to wait a while. Once I built so many buildings I had to wait for 60 immigrants to arrive before any of these buildings could start working. Using the Ban Birth Control Edict can help to increase population in that situation. Use the Immigration office to keep a tight control your population levels – you want everyone to have a job and have a few unemployed left over but more than 10 and the Communists become unhappy.



EL PRESIDENTE HIMSELF:

Creating an avatar appropriate to each map can be a big help. If you know you will need lots of soldiers, be an ex-general so it's easier to recruit them. If you need tourists, be an ex-travel agent, that sort of thing. El Presidente can do a lot in the game. He can give speeches at his palace during elections, give production boost to factories and farms - all sorts of things. Keep him busy doing things all the time.

I always play a beneficent Presidente. Many of the online guides advocate ruthlessness and swindling money away to your Swiss bank account but I've never found this to be necessary. Look at each factions main demands and give it to them. They will always complain about something but this will keep them mostly happy. The most evil I've ever been is to deny the people elections while I was very unpopular as I was struggling to get things going. If you hold elections, give a speech and talk about the biggest issue facing the island – work out what this is by looking at the almanac. Promise to fix it and you immediately get a load of support. If you then actually fix the problem the election is as good as won. I've never had to rig the votes or use the army to quash revolt. I did once shoot Penultimo to see what it sounded like (it's very funny) but I re-loaded the game afterwards. My favourite thing is to announce amnesties and see rebels come back from the jungle and reintegrate into my society. In my earlier games when I wasn't so sure what I was doing I would have sizeable rebel forces build up against me. In this case, raise soldier wages, build an armoury, build guard posts near your mines/oil refineries and build an army camp in that order. You have to be doing something really wrong to be overthrown by rebels!



A WAY TO KEEP THINGS INTERESTING:

What usually happens is you start the game by building up around your palace and you have to build several grotty tenements because you need to house a lot of people. As the game goes on and I have spare money to play around with, I do my best to "gentrify" the area around my palace by building luxury flats or better and pull down the pollution-heavy construction yard, grotty tenements etc. It's very satisfying to end the game having created a vista of your palace surrounded by expensive buildings, a golden statue of yourself, parks and gardens while the National Day of Celebration fireworks explode overhead. Take some screenshots and enjoy!