Tropico 2: Pirate Cove Preview

Pirates aren't exactly loveable, but we've seen enough heroics and humor in games and movies featuring eye-patch-wearing sailors that many of us have a soft spot for them. It's somewhat surprising, then, that there haven't been many pirate games--Sid Meier's Pirates, LucasArts' Monkey Island series, and Akella's Sea Dogs come to mind--and very few of them have combined that offbeat brand of pirate humor with serious gameplay. It's a tricky path to tread, but the designers at Frog City have had PopTop's excellent Tropico--which itself treated a serious political subject with a light touch--to serve as a model for its own upcoming game, Tropico 2: Pirate Cove.

Tropico 2's sunny shores are packed with captive laborers and pirates looking for some R&R.

Tropico 2 borrows only a few basic elements from its predecessor and is basically a brand-new game. Apart from the tropical Caribbean setting, the new game borrows from some of Tropico's basic game mechanics and its interface. Drawing parallels between the two games isn't enough to explain Tropico 2, but there are some easy parallels. Instead of a dictator of a 20th-century banana republic, in Tropico 2 you play as a pirate king. As leader of the pirate island, it's your responsibility to keep the pirates happy, the captive laborers fearful, and the plundered treasure pouring into the island's coffers.

The career of the pirate king is elaborated over the course of a 15-mission campaign. The first 10 missions are intended to teach you increasingly more about the game, and the last five are challenges that open up most of the buildings and game options and are intended to be a truer test of skill and strategy. The campaign starts out in the middle of the 17th century and ends in the early part of the 18th, so there's no mystery as to Tropico 2's time and place, but the game turns to both popular myth and history for its pirate flavor. There are plenty of opportunities to lure famous names like Blackbeard and Henry Morgan to the island to captain your ships and prove their unsavory reputations.

Nobody would expect pirates to be nice, and they're not. The pirate island's economy is entirely based on the money that comes in from robbing ships. Build a dock or two, equip a ship with cannons, and load it with crew and a captain and you'll then be ready to take a piece of the Caribbean riches. While you don't manually control ships in combat, there is some strategy involved in picking missions for your pirate ships, outfitting six types of ships, and choosing specific battle tactics--like staying back to pound opposing ships with cannons or rushing in to board.

Pirate ships are the lifeblood of the economy--outfit 'em and send 'em out to sea for plunder.

Most of the looting takes place on a strategic map that divides the Caribbean into regions and lets you give orders to ships as they set sail. As a scenario progresses, the map may fill in with the locations of prime trade routes, but a dedicated exploration mission can take care of that more quickly. Likewise, each successful cruise will bring back a gaggle of captives to work in the shops and fields, but some shops require specialists that can be had quicker by sending out a kidnapping mission. The game is designed to bring high rewards for high risk, and an aggressive player could see all of an island's pirates living in mansions not all that long into a scenario. There are three nations to prey on and negotiate with--Spain, England, and France--and careful mission selection and some diplomacy can lead to official privateer status, which is one way to win a mission.

To keep the gold flowing in and keep a lid on revolt, you'll have to keep your island's population in check. The pirates live a life of comparative luxury, and any respectable pirate cove will have a good entertainment district to meet their needs. As in Tropico or even The Sims, each pirate has a series of bars that track their desires in categories such as food, rest, gambling, and "wenching." R and R takes place in a number of buildings that are purchased and built, and most entertainment structures come in low-, middle-, and high-rent versions that cater to different pirate demographics, as some will have more money in their pockets than others. If a pirate ever gets extremely dissatisfied, he's likely to draw his cutlass and take it out on the nearest passerby--and if he lives, the experience may just put him back in a good mood.