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Hands-on with Tropico 7 at Gamescom 2025
C
Charlie Wacholz
Almost the entire demo spun out from trying to win over one citizen. Plucked from the unwashed masses of the island nation, Dumont used this workaday guy to show me just how comprehensive Tropico 7’s simulation gets.
We started by looking at his base happiness. Determined by a number of factors, ranging from work life to the availability of different foods near his house. Turns out, the poor guy was pretty unhappy. While he seemed to have a decent work life at the joinery, he just wasn’t satisfied with his diet, and it was bringing him down. So we took a look at the different foods he was eating to try and figure out how we could diversify his diet a bit with our control over industry and trade. Despite living near the ocean, he wasn’t getting enough fish. So we decided to juice the budget at a nearby grocery store to get more seafood in his diet and increase our imports of certain fruits.
Then we took a look at his politics. Tropico 7 uses a pretty standard political compass, with everyone falling in alliance with a major political faction like communist, socialist, capitalist, and so on. A moderate capitalist, our Joe-schmo isn’t in perfect alignment with the mildly authoritarian, left-leaning style of government set up for the demo, but he’s still relatively open-minded. Some citizens might be more polarized and potentially hard to influence, but nobody is completely immune to propaganda.
To spread your propagandistic agenda, you’ll need to take over a media outlet to use it as your mouthpiece. Each workplace, even a radio station or newspaper, has its own set of different types of workflows. In the case of a newspaper, it’s hard to control the flow of information within a “Free Spirit” workplace. Instead, we changed the work style to “Alternate Facts,” to first sow misinformation and foster distrust among the people in their media institutions before eventually swooping in with propaganda and legislation to win over more voters to my party.
Tropico also makes it easy to track the progress of my political takeover. In the same menu and map where you find your political positioning on the orientation chart, you can toggle a few different options, including one to view a complete map of every citizen in your kingdom’s political views.
Different edicts and policies will influence your own standing on the political alignment chart as a ruler. That placement also unlocks new policies that correspond to your positioning. In keeping with Tropico’s satirical theme, a lot of them can get pretty silly, poking fun at recent events in the world of politics, but you’ll also see standard contemporary legislative decisions like environmental policy or gay marriage in there, too.
And if all of this fails, you might find yourself in danger of losing an election, which would end the game. You can change how elections are run by doing things like doubling the value of wealthy voters’ ballots or, as a last-ditch effort, you can always bribe, kill, torture, institutionalize, arrest, or brainwash citizens—and even attempt to buy the election. These kinds of drastic measures might work, but they also run the risk of making the next election harder on yourself by eroding the public’s sense of trust in you as a good leader and politician.
Tropico’s always been about politics, city building, and economics, but you’ve always had to play the land you’re dealt. For the first time, Tropico 7 allows players to fully terraform the ocean to create land. It’s an expensive process, but it’s a great tool to help create more opportunity for economic success, without which your politics don’t matter.
Tropico 7 simulates a comprehensive, believable (if a bit silly) political and economic system to an almost unfathomable level of detail, to the point where even the garbage at each citizen’s house is simulated. By setting up numerous interconnected systems and expanding their depth and how they interact, Tropico 7 promises a state-of-the-art dictator sim for the ages. It’s currently set to release on the Epic Games Store in 2026. Wishlist it now.
