Tropico II: Testers Required!

Poptop has announced that it requires testers to test Tropico 2 between Feb 21st-23rd! Here is the details from their site:

TROPICO 2 TESTERS NEEDED!

That's right, we are looking for a few good testers to have a run at a beta version of Tropico 2.  The test will take place over the days of February 21 to 23, with exact times to be determined.  So you want to join in, but you need to know how.  Just send an e-mail to jobs@poptop.com with the subject of        "T2 Beta Test" and the following info:

• Previous testing experience, if any
• Previous experience playing Tropico and/or any other "god-sim" games
• Your availability for at least one day from February 21-23

The testing period will run about 4-5 hours long.  All testing will be done in house and on-site at the Tropico offices.  This is a voluntary testing event.  All accepted testers will receive an e-mail letting them know they were accepted, other applicants will not be contacted.  We're looking forward to your e-mails!

Tropico II: Walthrough

Frogcity has released a downloadable walkthrough of Tropico 2! To download it, you can grab the file here, its 2.2mb in size.

28th January 2003

18th January 2003

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Tropico 2: First Info From Poptop!

Poptop Software has just released more information about the forthcoming Tropico 2, which is being developed by Frog City. Anyway, they have added new information to their site, including two new screenshots, which you can see on the Tropico 2 Screenshots page.

Here is the new info from the Poptop site

Tropico II: Pirate Cove, soon to be released, is the official sequel to the award winning game Tropico.  

Tropico II: Pirate Cove will put a new spin on the world of Tropico, as players take the role of a Pirate King with an island to rule.  The island's economy will focus on loot and plunder instead of the intricacies of production.

Tropico II: Pirate Cove, the next installment in the popular Tropico series, will be sure to delight fans of the series while offering a richly new experience.  With a stronger focus on the characters inhabiting your island, with such infamous names as Blackbeard himself, Tropico II: Pirate Cove will surely shiver your timbers. 

Developed by Frog City, Tropico II: Pirate Cove will feature the same game engine used in the original Tropico with many added features and enhancements.  Be sure to stop by their website to keep up to date with their wonderful work on this game!

IN DEVELOPMENT   - due Winter 2002

"We're taking Tropico in a new direction, it's still the Caribbean, but now the player rules an island teeming with pirates, complete with the management of captives, rum supply, and parrot aviaries." - Rachel Bernstein, president of Frog City Software.

Tropico II: Pirate Cove offers several innovations to the Tropico world including:

• A reverse take on the traditional economic model

• Game characters with unique personalities

• New "zoning" system for housing

• All-new art and animations to capture the true pirate feel

• Much, much more

Tropico 2: CGM Article & 6 New Screenshots!

Back in late March, CGM ran an article which was the announcment for Tropico 2, and has so far been the only detailed source of information on the game. CGOnline has now made the article availible to read online, & in full! To read the full article, click here.

Along with the article is 6 brand new screenshots! To view these, visit the Tropico 2 Screenshots page.

Here is the article:

If you're walking in San Francisco's Sunset district, you might pass a tinted glass storefront with a buzzer on the door. Behind the glass, you'll see a big plastic trash can with the words "Frog City" written in magic marker. It's hardly a storefront sign—it's there to keep the neighbors from stealing their trash can—but it's the only way you'd know you're standing in front of the office of this small group of modest developers.

For a company working on its fourth game, a sequel to the banana-republic strategy game Tropico dubbed Tropico 2: Pirate Cove, Frog City is small. There are only nine people in this second story office, located over a bank. You can hear the rumble of the vault closing downstairs every day at 5pm. Some of the people who work here live close enough to ride their bicycles, which are propped against the walls and under the stairwell. There are tire scuff marks on the walls where the bikes have been carried in over the years. There are three vacuum cleaners crowded into one corner. They're behind a skateboard and a few scooters, which have obviously been ridden up and down the length of the office, much to the distress of the ragged carpet.

Bill & Ted & Rachel's excellent adventure
Frog City president Rachel Bernstein wears her dark hair pulled back from her Mediterranean face. She's talkative and amiable, the kind of woman who would insist you stay for dinner. Her husband Ted Spieth is slouched atop a giant inflatable ball, one of the strange doodads in this office, only slightly less an eyesore than their big orange couch. He's a quiet, beefy guy who looks like he might beat you up, but then he talks and you realize he's just kind of shy.

They were introduced by mutual friends at Princeton, where Rachel studied computer science and Ted studied psychology. After school, Ted worked variously in pizza delivery, paralegal work, and plant doctoring. For this latter job, he would come to an office building, cut the sick parts off the plant, and declare it cured. He got fired when the janitors went on strike and he refused to cross the picket line to tend to sick plants.

Ted's brother Bill, a skinny guy with a graying ponytail, looks like someone who would drive a vintage Volkswagen Beetle. His glasses and trimmed mustache give him a bookish look. He leans back like a professor when he talks. He got a law degree from Harvard, did legal advocacy work for three years, and then got fed up and quit.

One night in the winter of 1994, while Rachel was working at home, porting some game to the ill-fated Phillips CD-i, Ted and Bill were fooling around with a board game in the dining room. "Hey, you should make our game," Ted said, poking his head into the office where she was programming away. The two brothers had always made up games, even creating their own role-playing system when they were kids and couldn't figure out how to get a copy of Dungeons & Dragons.

"I said, 'Yeah right, okay, but you know you have to do some boring stuff'," she recalls, "As far as I was concerned, they were just kind of these dilettantes." But before long, they'd created the prototype for what would become Imperialism. "We had saved up some money to make a down payment on a house. So it came down to 'do we start a game company or buy a house?'". The house went by the wayside and the three of them formed Frog City (the name is a play on Fog City, a nickname for San Francisco).

The company's most recent title, Trade Empires, suffered from some questionable choices, as they'll freely admit. But it taught them a valuable lesson in the importance of marketing: you have to get the name of your game out there before you put it on the shelves. One way to ensure this is to develop a sequel, which has inherent name recognition. This is part of what attracted Frog City to Tropico 2.

From banana republics to buccaneers
In Tropico, you're the dictator of a small island during the Cold War. In Tropico 2, you're a pirate king in the seventeenth century. Don't bother looking for a backstory with a time machine or how this is a prequel about the dictator's great great grandfather, because there isn't one. Tropico 2 is a sequel without a segue.

Based on the success of Tropico, the publishers at Take Two wanted an expansion pack. But the game's designer, PopTop president (and CGM columnist) Phil Steinmeyer, had no desire to do it himself. "You work on a game for two years and you don't want to have anything to with it anymore," he jokes, "I'm like, 'Okay, other people can do Tropico stuff'." During the search for another developer, Steinmeyer spoke with Rachel Bernstein of Frog City, who he knew from regular conversations at the Game Developer's Conference. Frog City was still finishing up its latest game, Trade Empires, so they wouldn't have been able to work on the expansion.

What about a sequel?

"The idea just kind of bubbled up," Steinmeyer says. However, there weren't a lot of specifics about what the sequel would be like. "We knew we couldn't do another Castro style game. There just wasn't enough material to do it twice." So everyone at Frog City brainstormed, looking for a twist.

"We were all talking one day," Bernstein recalls, "when [lead engineer] Mark [Palange] said, 'Oh yeah, I meant to mention this the other day: what about pirates?' He just kind of dropped it out there, like no one was going to like it. But we were all like, 'Pirates? Pirates! Yeah!'" It was the perfect twist that caused everything to fall into place.

"Tropico," Steinmeyer muses, just saying the name to hear how it sounds, "I mean, come on, 'Tropico'. The name is just 'tropical.' It's like 'island.' It's a setting. It's a great place for a pirate game. I think it's the perfect direction to move the franchise. Too many sequels think inside the box. They think it's gotta be just like the previous game. But this is definitely a departure. It's got the geographic setting and the humor, but otherwise it's a major shift."

"Other pirate games are on the ships," Bernstein says, recalling Sid Meier's Pirates, Hothouse Creations' Cutthroats, and Akella's Sea Dogs, "but this is the pirate's secret base, where they go back to satisfy their wenching and gambling needs and get their ships reloaded to go out again. It's definitely a different approach. Pirates are a pretty rich topic, but we've found a fresh angle."

The player assumes the role of a pirate king, with a list of personal advantages and disadvantages, just like Tropico's dictators. You can jump into a randomly generated scenario or play through a campaign of linked scenarios that progress through about 100 years of Caribbean history. The basic gameplay is similar to Tropico: you keep track of your population's needs, put down buildings, tweak the occasional setting, and issue edicts. For the most part, you just set it up and enjoy the animated bustle of your little city. However, there are significant differences in the economy and the population that should make the sequel feel like a new game with a reworked set of rules.

Treasure island
For starters, Tropico 2 uses what Frog City calls "a plunder-based economy." In Tropico, you made money by exporting goods or attracting tourists. But this time, you'll make money by going out and stealing it. Your pirates set sail to prowl the seas and, barring any mishaps, they'll eventually return with a boatload of booty. As with the first game, there's a system of raw materials and processed resources, but these exist almost entirely to make your pirates happier and more efficient. Build stuff to make your pirates better, because better pirates steal more money, and more money lets you build stuff to make your pirates better.

Pirates have a range of needs and skills. To varying degrees, every pirate needs resting, feasting, wenching, gambling, drinking, and stashing. Provide them with a place to eat, drink, sleep, visit courtesans, gamble, and carouse to meet their first five needs. Stashing involves their desire to put away plundered money, effectively removing it from your island's economy. These needs can change depending on the situation. For instance, older pirates wench less and stash more.

Pirates have skill levels in seamanship, navigation, cannons, muskets, and blades. They also have qualities like leadership and courage. Some of these can be improved by building a pirate school and issuing an edict to send a pirate there. Other skills can be improved by building certain structures. An observatory will boost all your pirates' navigation skill. A parrot aviary will give a pirate the extra leadership that comes from having a parrot on his shoulder. A hat maker will give him the extra courage a pirate gets from having a scary pirate hat. Obviously, Frog City isn't abandoning Tropico's sense of humor, and it's certain that the team's own wry sense of humor lends a wealth of resources. After all, it's been well honed along the company's somewhat bumpy ride toward a more mainstream profile.

Sid Meier's The One That Got Away
While shopping the Imperialism prototype around, it went through a variety of names, including Sphere of Influence and Age of Industry. At one point, they were in negotiations to publish it as Sid Meier's Industrialization. Finally, they signed a contract with SSI and began a fifteen-month development cycle. But SSI kept getting excited about adding new features. The schedule was pushed back in fits and starts to give them more time. "I didn't like that," says Rachel, who's known for efficient scheduling and meeting deadlines, "You can't keep moving the finish line of the race and expect people to sprint at the end." Finally, after the fifteen-month project had been extended to two years, the game was finished. Frog City handed it over to SSI and started work on Pantheon, a role-playing/strategy hybrid set against the backdrop of the Trojan War.

Luckily it turned out that Imperialism exceeded all expectations. The publisher was eager for a sequel. So Frog City decided to try to do two games at once. But as SSI began its slide through a long succession of sales and reorganizations, they could only keep one of Frog City's projects, opting for the Imperialism sequel. Pantheon had to go by the wayside and Bill is particularly disappointed that it was never finished. "It would have been great," he says, "Even after all these years, no one's done anything like it." The idea was that your hero would have to go on quests to improve the city building part of the game, which would in turn improve your hero's ability to go on quests.

At first, they envisioned Imperialism II as one of those gold editions/sequels, with a few new features added to the original. "We called it Little Imp 2," Rachel says. But SSI pushed the release back several months to avoid direct competition with Heroes of Might and Magic III, Alpha Centauri, and Call to Power, all of which were in the pipeline for a Christmas 1998 releases. This gave Frog City more time to expand the design, fleshing it out into a full-fledged sequel and even bringing in resources from Pantheon. Ironically, the competing titles all missed their Christmas release and all four games came out next spring within a few weeks of each other. All are hoping that Tropico 2 enjoys a tighter ship.

And speaking of ships…
Pirate ships are the cornerstones of your economy. You can build them as an advanced form of industry, and if you're really lucky you can capture them. They work somewhat like buildings in Tropico, where you chose the best workers based on their skill levels and plugged them into a building's available slots. Similarly, you assign your choice of pirates to the slots for a ship's captain, lieutenants, and crew. Stock your ship with food and equip it with cannons, muskets, and cutlasses. Different kinds of ships have different crew requirements and storage capacities. Set the ship's preferred tactic in combat. Does it attack from a distance, close to short range, or attempt to board enemy vessels? Set which nationalities it will attack and how much of the gold the crew gets to keep for themselves. Each ship has a satisfaction rating, which goes up as the ship is docked and the crew runs around the island meeting their needs. The higher the satisfaction rating the less likely the crew will be to mutiny if things get tough at sea. Eventually, the ship will be ready to set sail.

Tropico 2 has a strategic map of the Caribbean, divided into about 20 sea zones. At first, you only have access to the zone immediately adjacent to your pirate island, but as you send your ships out to explore, you gain access to more zones and learn the location of colonies and trade routes, which are randomized each time you play. You give a ship orders to plunder a specific zone. The amount of time it takes to get there and back is a factor of the captain's navigation skill. How it fares in ship-to-ship encounters is a factor of the captain's seamanship, the crew's skills, the type of ship, and the weaponry available.

As soon as a ship gets badly beat up, runs out of supplies, or fills up with booty, it returns home, where it restocks while the crew takes shore leave to meet their needs. When the satisfaction level is high enough, it automatically returns to the scene of its last mission. Unless you intervene, pirate sorties are an automatic process, resulting in occasional losses and a regular income of gold. But perhaps more important than the gold are the captives.

Kidnapped
Whenever your pirate ship returns, you get a report on how it fared and what booty it brought back. "The main thing you're looking forward to when you see what you've got is captives," says designer Bill Spieth, "There are a lot of different skilled captives that'll make the island run more efficiently and the only way to get them is to kidnap them."

For instance, you'll need captives in order to unlock buildings in Tropico 2. "We kept basically the same number of structures from Tropico, but we narrowed the choices down," Spieth explains, "At the start of a scenario, you can't build much. In general, the requirement for building an industry is having captured a skilled worker for that industry." In other words, if you want a rum distillery, you have to capture a skilled rum distiller, and then you can build the building and that guy will work in it and make you rum.

On one hand, this puts you at the mercy of whatever spoils your marauding pirates stumble across. But the player can skew this by telling his pirates where to sail and which nationality to attack. "To a certain extent you can try to control what path you want to take through the building tree by targeting your missions. You can decide who you want to plunder based on the skills you want to find. So if you wanted to get the best possible cook, you have to go after the French ships. If you want the best shopkeeper, you need an English ship. Where do the best courtesans come from?" he asks his brother Ted, also a designer at Frog City.

"Spain," Ted answers.

"We have a table," Bill explains. Sure enough, there's an Excel spreadsheet with their own seventeenth century national stereotypes. But not all captives are skilled. So what good are the unskilled captives?

"They do all the heavy lifting," Bernstein says, pointing out how each building has its own gopher to carry goods. In Tropico, you had to build and staff teamster offices to move food, raw materials, and manufactured goods around your island. As the lifeblood of your economy, there was a lot riding on these little guys. But Frog City wanted to smooth out some of the kinks that came from Tropicans having to walk all over the map. "We wanted to figure out why Tropicans were spending so much time walking a long way and what can we do to make them work more efficiently," she says.

Roads were one solution. Whereas roads never really worked very well in Tropico, they're essential in the sequel, as characters will only travel on roads. Giving each building its own dedicated teamster was another solution. In Tropico, you had to carefully place construction offices and marketplaces, but the equivalents in Tropico 2, the construction tent and chuck wagon, are moveable so they can be situated anywhere you need workers or food. Captives also play a big part in reducing travel time. Since they don't have many needs to meet, they don't have to visit many buildings.

No, not the towel, anything but the towel!
"Unlike Tropico, where you try and keep everybody happy more or less, your goal with captives happiness, from your point of view, is to try to make them as afraid and as despairing as possible," Bill Spieth says with a sadistic chuckle, "You want to convince them that it's impossible to escape and that the pirates are powerful and great. You also have to feed them a little bit or they'll try to escape because they don't want to starve to death."

There's a security level for each area of the map that helps determine whether or not a captive will try to make a break for it. Security is a factor of how you place structures like forts, watchtowers, and stockades. Almost every building has a slot to employ a pirate overseer. You can also provide churches to opiate the captives and convince them to accept their sorry lot (pirates, as we all know, are atheists and have no use for churches). Then there's the interrogation chamber, which was originally a torture chamber. You hit a captive with an edict and he goes to the chamber. "It's another way to find out information about sea zones, trade routes, and the locations of settlements," says Ted Spieth.

"But you'll want to pick a captive who you think might know something," Bill chimes in, "A thought bubble page for captives will be set up so you'll get a tip that that guy might know something, so maybe it's worth sending him off to the interrogation chamber." "But it's a little risky," Ted says, "He may die."

Bernstein breaks in. "They had this little torture thing going and I kept wondering whether it was really funny or whether it was just that the guys thought it was funny. Ted was making the torture pirate, so I asked, 'Can you make him funny?' So now he's a guy in a wife beater shirt, you know those white T-shirts, and he's got a little hood over his head and he towel flicks the captives. That was a torture thing I thought was funny."

Chalk up one more point for the light-heartedness of a woman's touch. "You want to be making fun of the people on this island," Bernstein says, "Pirates are good for that. There are a lot of groups in the world that you can't make fun of, but pirates aren't one of them."

Although Tropico is a game with a deep undercurrent of earnest strategy, this pleasantly amiable approach gives it much of its appeal, and with Tropico 2 following in those jolly footsteps, this might be the game that puts Frog City's name on the map. And maybe a year from now, after the game's been released, you'll be walking in San Francisco's Sunset district and you'll see a proper Frog City sign hanging in front of that glass storefront and you'll think, 'Hey, aren't those the guys who did Tropico 2?'

Along with the article is 6 brand new screenshots! To view these, visit the Tropico 2 Screenshots page.

Tropico 2: First Preview

http://www.nemesisonline.com/ has produced a short preview of Tropico 2. Its not very detailed, but its the first one, so I thought I'd post it.

Tropico for the PC was one of those games you really wanted to like and get into, but suffered from some basic gameplay problems that really hampered the enjoyment of the game. One of the biggest of the flaws had to be the A.I. for the population that sometimes was just not up to stuff and would fail to properly fulfill their duties. Trust me when I say few things are as irritable as when the population of your island keeps calling out for better housing when you have just spent a small fortune building them such. Not that the game was all bad, in fact it was far from it. I still play Tropico every once and a while and quickly found myself excited at the recent news of its sequel, Pirate Cove.
     According to the developers, Tropico 2: Pirate Cove will be a vast departure from the original. Instead of maintaining a small island state fueled of locals and tourists, you will be king of an island full of pirates. That's right, you heard me, pirates. No longer will you be managing hotels and spas; your goods to deal with will include rum, captives, and even parrots.
     The plans are to have the traditional economic model be reversed. You will gain wealth not by building a great population, but by plundering another one. The plans are also to have the individual pirates show much greater personality differences than anyone did in the original Topico. The pirates that gain the most wealth will even automatically upgrade their homes to show such.
     The game is still too early for screen shots, but is being planned for a fall release. More information can be found at the developers website, www.frogcity.com. Look back for more information as soon as it becomes available.

Tropico 2: An Introduction

This is from developer Frog City, and is their personal introduction to the game:

Rule over a hidden pirate island in Tropico 2: Pirate Cove. As King of the Pirates, you're the top scurvy dog on a secret base where pirates come to carouse and to refit their ships.

Tropico 2: Pirate Cove builds on the humorously addictive play of Tropico, and also adds in several innovations and changes to the rules. The economy is a reverse of the original: in Tropico you made money by selling stuff you made on your island. In Pirate Cove, you get rich pirating the goods other people have made. Plus you keep the captives too. Keeping the island economy moving falls largely to them. Captives from plundered ships do the hard work on the island, so the pirates can enjoy the delights of shore leave and re-supply their ships.

The pirates are characters you'll spend time developing, as you build up mean fighting crews with specialties in boarding, cannon fire, or harassment with muskets. Take Blackbeard, Anne Bonny and a host of other buccaneers through a campaign spanning 100 years of piracy in the Caribbean

Tropico 2: Announcement Articles

Here is a round up of articles produced over the last few days announcing Tropico 2. First up www.avault.com :

Computer and video game publisher Gathering of Developers along with developer Frog City today announced Tropico 2: Pirate Cove, the sequel to the publisher’s top-selling Caribbean dictator simulation. Set on a hidden pirate island, the game is scheduled to ship this fall.

As a Pirate King, players manage a 17th century band of buccaneers in Tropico 2. To attract the most frightening of history’s sea-faring bad boys, Pirate Kings must keep their charges well supplied between voyages. Success in Tropico 2 depends on careful management of the pirate population. As dead men earn no plunder, the King must keep his pirates well equipped for potentially lethal missions. Sea dogs require muskets, cutlasses, cannons, and the skills to use them when they venture forth to plunder the Spanish Main. Pirates equipped with a parrot on their shoulders and a scary black hat are more likely to strike fear into their victims’ hearts, we’ve been assured.

Tropico 2 features several major changes to the original Tropico game. The traditional economic model is reversed: players maintain their wealth not by production of materials, but by plundering merchants on the high seas and bringing the victims back to the island as captive workers. In addition, the pirate characters show a great deal of individual personality. Further, the island is zoned so richer pirates may sequester themselves in their own mansions, which automatically upgrade as their standards of living improve.

Tropico 2: Pirate Cove stars Blackbeard and other pirates based loosely on historical figures, organized in a campaign covering 100 years of pirate action. Along with dozens of their fictional counterparts, these legendary fellows are readying their old sea legs for the game’s release this fall.

from http://pc.ign.com

Gathering of Developers announced today that Tropico 2 is in development and scheduled for release this coming fall. Hell yeah, we say. Hell...yeah.

What's surprising is that PopTop, famed developers of the original, will not be charged with bringing this one out, rather Frog City, of Pantheon and Trade Empires fame has taken up the helm.

In another twist, this sequel to Tropico, will completely forsake its dictating roots and instead welcome in a new ear of pirating.

Rachel Bernstein, president of Frog City Software:

• "We're taking Tropico in a new direction. It's still the Caribbean, but now the player rules an island teeming with pirates, complete with the management of captives, rum supply, and parrot aviaries."

In Tropico 2: Pirate Cove players assume the role of a pirate leader with no equal. As pirate leaders do, it'll be up to you to manage your collection of seventeenth century scurvy dogs with the intention of attracting more pirating Petes by keeping your mates happy, healthy, and supplied between voyages. Drinks, wenches, gambling establishments, and lots of food must all be provided for to keep spirits high, muskets loaded, and swords sharp.

This iteration promises three large changes to the already established play style. For starters, the economic model is being reversed. Wealth is now attained thoruhg plundering and enslaving, and not by constructing, producing and hiring. Furthermore, characters will have personalities, making them valuable, cherished, loved, adored (you get the idea). The island is also now partitioned, and allows for pirates to live the solitary life in automatically upgrading homesteads that convey the status of the pirate at hand.

I think it's pretty obvious that we'll have more leading up to the game's autumn release.

And lastl for now www.gamespot.com

Gathering of Developers, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, has announced Tropico 2: Pirate Cove, its upcoming island management game. The game is a sequel to Tropico, a game developed by PopTop Software that lets players assume the role of a dictator in control of a small Caribbean island nation. The new game will feature the same style of real-time management gameplay as the original game, but with a number of changes and a very different theme.

"We're taking Tropico in a new direction," said Rachel Bernstein, president of Frog City Software, the San Francisco-based studio that is developing Tropico 2. "It's still the Caribbean, but now the player rules an island teeming with pirates, complete with the management of captives, rum supply, and parrot aviaries."

Players will assume the role of a pirate king in the 17th century, and they must oversee a group of pirates and their tropical island hideaway. The game features a campaign that spans 100 years and is filled with fictional characters and pirates based on historical figures, such as Blackbeard.

In order to build a successful pirate colony, players must keep their pirate visitors happy with plenty of drinking, gambling, feasting, and other activities. In addition, they must keep a number of pirate supplies on hand, such as muskets, cutlasses, cannons, parrots, and scary black hats. The game's economic model is also different from that of the original game. Rather than producing materials, players must plunder merchants for goods and captives that can be brought back to the island and put to use. As the pirate colony grows, the more-successful pirates will build themselves decadent mansions filled with booty.

Tropico 2: Pirate Cove is scheduled for release this fall. We'll post more information about the game as it becomes available.

1st March 2002

Tropico 2: 2 New Images!

To see the new images goto Screenshots page for Tropico 2

Tropico 2: Press Release Out!

Take 2 has released the press release for Tropico 2. The game's full title is Tropico 2: Pirate's Cove. To read the full press release goto the Tropico 2 Press Releases page.

Here is a basic summary of the press release:

There are 3 major changes to the Tropico concept in Pirate's Cove:

"Tropico 2" features several major innovations to the original "Tropico" game.  The traditional economic model is reversed: the player maintains their wealth not by production of materials, but by plundering merchants on the high seas and bringing the victims back to the island as captive workers. In addition, the pirate characters show a great deal of individual personality, so that the player becomes truly vested in the characters' well-being. The island is also zoned so that richer pirates may sequester themselves in their own booty-filled mansions, which automatically upgrade as their standards of living improve.

"Tropico 2: Pirate Cove" stars Blackbeard and other pirates based loosely on historical figures, organized in a campaign that takes the pirates through 100 years of pirate action. Along with dozens of their fictional counterparts, these legendary fellows are readying their old sea legs for the game's release this fall."

Introducing Tropico 2:

As an all-powerful Pirate King, players must manage a seventeenth century band of buccaneers in "Tropico 2: Pirate Cove." To attract the most frightening of history's sea-faring bad boys, Pirate Kings must keep their charges brave and well-supplied between voyages. The island's "yo-ho-ho's" must stay at a feverish pitch in order to keep the King and his buccaneers satisfied with drinking, wenching, gambling, feasting, and the best in pirate accommodations.

Success in "Tropico 2: Pirate Cove" depends on careful management of the pirate population. As dead men earn no plunder, the King must keep his pirates well equipped for potentially lethal missions. Sea dogs require muskets, cutlasses, cannons, and the skills to use them when they venture forth to plunder the Spanish Main. Pirates equipped with a parrot on their shoulders and a scary black hat are more likely to strike fear into their victims' hearts.

Tropico 2: Info Bite

Franz from Poptop has confirmed, that all though that Poptop is not developing Tropico 2, it is involved with the project, as Franz is acting as a producer.

Tropico 2: Offical Site Up

Checkout the offical Tropico 2: Pirates Cove @ http://www.frogcity.com/pirates/intro.html

28th February 2002

Tropico 2: Bits

- 1 New screenshot has been added to the Tropico 2 Screenshots page.

- Here is a quote from the www.cgonline.com article confirming Tropico 2:

Tropico 2 has a strategic map of the Caribbean divided into about 20 sea zones. At first, you only have access to the zone immediately adjacent to your pirate island, but as you send your ships out to explore, you gain access to more zones and learn the location of colonies and trade routes, which are randomized each time you play.

27th February 2002

Tropico 2 Confirmed

It has been confimred that Tropico 2 is in development at Frog City www.frogcity.com, with Poptop acting as supervisor for the project. The title has yet to be offically confirmed, however an article in mag Computer Games confirms it & a press release is expected soon. There are only 2 poor quality screenshot avaible at this time, but you can see them on our Tropico 2 Screenshots page.

I have added 4 pages about Tropico 2, here are the listings:

First Info

Press Releases

Screenshots

Tropico 2 Wishlists

Tropico 2 is a game based on Pirates and builds upon the original concept of Tropico.

Tropico 2 Wishlists

Now that Tropico 2 has been confimed, it is time to tell Frog City just what you want in the game! And we have established a page for you to do that on, so get posting!

Tropico 2 Wishlists