I bought a CD player to (among other things) let me replay Tropico 4 and Age of Empires III, found that Tropico 4 was bugged with its shitty product key protection, and then wound up rebuying it on Steam. It's fine. I can see why I beat the campaign and then never played it again last time: it feels like the same thing every time, and the campaign just walks you through playing that same thing with a narrative and humor (and I do like it, although I wish they committed more to its Cold War setting, most of the time it doesn't feel like it's set in the 1950s, it just feels like it's set in The World but the Soviets still exist). I don't know that the content is deficient compared to any other city-builder, but I think that unless you play a high difficult you're just not going to really need to engage with the dictator side of it (subversive actions through the secret police, war) and it just feels like every island will wind up the same.
But compared to when I was a kid (I played a lot of strategy games, but never really learned to play them properly), I've been getting more out of building my city purposefully to look somewhat realistic. I'll have a district around the palace of government buildings (seems like there was a missed opportunity with them to have foreign powers have separate embassies, and then interactions with that), a mini-district of the immigration office and customs house at the dockyards, an educational complex that I tend to locate near my media complex and potentially overlapping with the government/cathedral area (for the College). Hospital usually goes near the College and/or Cathedral. Cathedral goes in a prominent place where it would in real life. Entertainment buildings like pubs and restaurants can be spread out, but a dedicated entertainment district is usually built somewhat kind of blending from the tourist suburb to the metropole, with sub-districts for amusement park land, the cultural center complex (zoos, academies, art museums, gardens, etc.) and I like to semi-segregate my wealthy and my trashy tourist districts. Then of course there are housing blocks, and I build rural exurbs around the garages in the countryside with marketplaces, pubs, clinics and churches.
I've come to realize how powerful tourism and agriculture is. As a dumbass kid I mostly fixated on mines and industry, but that's a horrible strategy. The thing is, it's your education that's your big developmental bottleneck. Tourism is easy to overdevelop and is the only industry that directly works on a problem your locals have (entertainment); you can get it up and running somewhat fast and cheaply, too, even if it is more complicated in terms of needing many different buildings (also slowing it down from a construction perspective). It's there to supplement, although it can be a leading sector. Agriculture is cheap and quick to fill in with open immigration. Really, you can just spam farms everywhere that's not settled with something more productive.
I think the game could have used tougher factions, and some of their characterization is goofy. This little Catholic island's Religious population's main agenda is prohibition (something Catholics have never given a shit about). For the time period, something like women's education would be a lot harsher of a tradeoff. Maybe motherhood is something Tropicans are more likely to select into when they're not high-earners, so do you want to gimp long-term native-born population growth? Likewise, Nationalists just generally don't matter, and they could; the game has immigrants coming from famous countries like Germany and Britain, when these people should really be coming from Spain and other Latin American hellholes mostly. But if it was framed that way, you could have some sort of ethnic tension mechanic or have it relate directly to the Caribbean wage. Basically, how do you get people: keep the women barefoot and pregnant (angering the Intellectuals and pleasing the Religious), or keep an endless stream of Not-Haitians flooding in (fueling Crime, political instability and angering the Nationalists)? Game's fine for when it was, it's just that I played it to be a Dictator Simulator and it wound up going down this really cringe Despicable Me direction as the series went on, I refused to play them past 4.
I've also been replaying Company of Heroes 2. I found that playing it on 2v2 makes a world of difference. I mostly played it 1v1, having allies didn't do much for me. But because of its weird design where you have larger maps but also share all zones (with no corresponding proportional decrease in your personal yields from the zones), you wind up getting way more fuel, meaning way more mechanization early on, meaning you actually get to play the game the way it was meant to be. It's totally different. Compared to being an idiot kid, I've been playing much more with micro (starting to get a head for APM, appreciation for why speed/reaction time/micro is a thing in RTS games, how that is engaging) and defenses. I used to have this stupid practice of just kind of letting my engineers mull around at the base, which is insanely wasteful. Now I understand to use them much more proactively, constantly laying down stuff like razor wire (it has to be babysat), screening my armor with them (so they're doing something constructive until I need them to fall back and repair said armor), stuff like that. I found that Snipers and Mortars (units I spammed in the campaign on Easy back in the day) are legitimately useful, but the former have to be babysat for how fragile they are, while the latter are best off being set and forgotten completely. Sniper's point is it has a blistering first attack, can kind of kite things, but it can't fight fast enough or withstand fire to really go take or hold a position. Mostly you use them for hard-countering the gun crews, especially if you can get a second one. The Mortars, being indirect fire with a medium range, just automatically back you up wherever you need it. I've gotten a lot better at using my armor thoughtfully, using call-in artillery and air thoughtfully, breaking off fights, using light vehicles intelligently. I like playing as the Wehrmacht and spamming machine gun bunkers everywhere to turn the entire map into a quagmire of pinning.
