Difficulty: Hard

Ah, there's nothing quite like a fine stogie in the afternoon. There's also nothing quite like crushing another country's economy out of sheer spite. Guess what your task in this scenario is?

Frankly put, $2 million worth of cigars within 50 years is not that difficult of a commitment to reach if you plan ahead to take advantage of the somewhat distant tobacco regions of your island. Though you start off in a corn breadbasket, you can't gain much tobacco until you start building farms on the other side of the mountain to the south. You'll want to build some housing and another construction office near the bump, just so you can build and staff the tobacco farms rather quickly. As you're getting your farms set up, though, you cannot neglect your civilians--they have a high expectation for democracy, and will be pretty fickle in elections if you don't make sure they're happy. You'll definitely need a high school relatively early; you're going to be building three or four cigar factories in your town, so you'll need at least 24 educated workers to fill the slots.

You must build your tobacco farms on the opposite side of this hill if you want enough crop to reach your target.

If you want some waypoints to work for, you might try to have four or five tobacco farms set up by 1960, with three cigar factories staffed and operational by 1965. After that, you must choose whether you want to continue building more factories or start branching your infrastructure so that you can build and staff a power plant. The auto-roller add-on to your factories will reduce the price of your cigars by 10 percent, but will increase productivity by 50 percent, effectively letting two souped-up factories produce the same amount of cigars as three normal ones, without the additional maintenance or wages. It will take a few years to produce and staff a power plant, however, so whether you want to pursue this particular path is up to you.

You should check your progress every few years, to make sure you're on the right track. Check the score tab from your almanac (el informé) to see how far you've come on the way to $2 million. Keep track of the progress in five-year increments to get a sense of how rapid the income is; if you're projecting a shortfall by the year 2000, you'd better start building more factories and farms.
 

« Previous Page

To GameSpot »