Here, we've gathered all the ideas we could think of that helped us become better tropical dictators. We've divided the tips into four sections: those that are useful from the very start of a game, those that should be heeded during the first 10 to 12 years of your rule, those that are best applied once your island is running smoothly, and those best saved for a blossoming regime.

Always Applicable

These ideas, as the title to the section suggests, are always applicable--they'll come in handy right from the start of your game all the way to the end of your reign.

Make Use of Construction Priorities

Once you've given the order to begin construction of a structure, clicking on it will let you give it a high, normal, or low priority (by making one, two, or three of the triangles in the control panel green). Your construction workers will then begin work on the nearest high-priority structure and move downward on the priority list if no high-priority structure exists. A dictator who makes good use of this fact can easily queue up a dozen or more buildings and have them built in the order he desires. You'll waste less of your workers' time if they can immediately move to another project after completing their current one rather than waiting on you to place another building. The only difficulty that arises is that roads have a relatively low priority, and as such, your structures will usually be built before the roads between them.

Ensure that You Will Win Every Election

Let's face the facts: Continuously refusing to hold an election will make your people hate you, and losing even one election will cause you to lose the game. With this in mind, you'll likely want to hold elections often and be assured of winning them all. When you agree to hold an election in 12 months, your circle window will turn into a graph showing the number of people supporting both you and your opponent (hit the Escape key if something else is shown in the window, and it will change to the graph).

If the election looks like it's going to be close (lots of people hovering near the center on either side), you can either have the election fixed just before its held at the expense of some respect from the people, or you can take the costlier high road by making your people happy during the year before the election. Edicts such as Mardi Gras, the Pan-Caribbean Games, tax cut, the headliner, Papal visit, and food for the people all do an excellent job of earning more voter support. Should the pre-election polls show that you have no serious chance of winning, you can always resort to more... stringent methods, such as issuing an arrest or heretic edict or even eliminating your opponent.

More Pay Equals More Respect

Your citizens will become disgruntled if you keep them at the same pay level for a long period of time. If you're running a democracy, it's helpful to give your workers a small raise, perhaps one or two dollars, before each election. This will give them a short-term increase in respect for you and will keep their job satisfaction high.

Living in Cardboard Boxes is Bad

Shacks have a rock-bottom housing quality rating, so an easy way to gain a bit of happiness is to build a tenement or two for early-game housing. This should gain you about 30 points of housing quality.

You can't use this land for farming ever again, and it'll also be useless for buildings, if you ever decide to bulldoze the mine.

Once you start to build your economy a bit, you'll want to use apartment buildings almost exclusively, just to gain the extra happiness. These hold only half of what tenements do, though, so if you're cramped for space, you might want to stick with the cheaper buildings.

Mining isn't Pretty

While mining can be hugely profitable, it is also an extremely ugly industry, so you can expect major reductions in your environmentalist faction respect if you rely on it overmuch. You should also check the land before you set up your mines; mining essentially ruins the land nearby for farming, so if you're planning to move into a factory economy, you might want to use the land for another farm instead.
 

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