>>15978694
They had some good ideas with having multiple islands constituting your country, so that you could change plans by discovering new resources or because natural disasters destroy part of your cities, but the Pirate Cove/Espionage thing ruins the game, because it practically allows you to cheat resources indefinitely without repercussions.
>>15980560
>"le funnah quirky dialogues XDDD" EVERYWHERE
Isn't this a staple of the series though? I guess they became really retarded in the last games but I remember having fun in 3 and 4. Also the final mission and mission briefing of 5 is surprisingly engaging.
>piss easy two tier economy of "build sugar plantation, build rum factory, swim in cash forever"
At least in the beta for 6, the economy is even more kinds of fucked up than 5. You can build a shitton of banks and set them to private banking, which gives you bonuses for rich citizens, but any time a citizen works in a bank they end up being richer, so you can have this feedback loop where, after reaching a certain wealth, you can create literally the Cayman Islands in-game. Would have been fun if it was some kind of difficult to achieve situation or just working in shit like endgame sandbox, but no, you can do it just about any time.
Wonders are terrible because they're too good, some of the bonuses you get make the game impossible to lose and the requirements for getting them are really easy to achieve (again, would have been fine if there were some sort of tiering to the best bonuses but no you can literally run the game without hospitals or pick up the Brandenburg Gate and have almost no political dissidents from the get go).
Factions also make no sense and don't really add any flavor to the game, because outside of flavor text the bonuses they give are interchangeable and the only things you can change are political status with the factions on the island, but then again you have the Black Market guy selling you stat bonuses for very little so you can never go below 50 reputation with all factions. Faction leaders also became completely boring and by the numbers, but I guess that's to be expected, given modern devs can't depict racist le-happy-Chinese salesmen without being shut down and have to include stronk wymin. The only three bearable/funny/interesting characters are the Axis and Allies reps and the Black Market dude. They made some ill-conceived General Ripper ripoff for the cold war era and he's the most boring, uninspired character in the whole franchise, and you bet your ass he comes asking for help every ten seconds. They even managed to make Penultimo boring. At least in 5 he was humorous and there were some characters (like the Crown's rep and Not Teddy Roosevelt) who were genuinely likeable.
As I mentioned earlier, the Black Market is a Cheat Engine. Theoretically a good idea because you can spend your offshore bank account money into it (so it's not just tied to your final score but actually does something) but the problem is that not only do bonuses refresh constantly and for little money, they literally give you get-out-of-jail cards so you can avoid or mitigate story missions you can't or won't do.
They also added this retarded fertility of the soil bonus that basically forces you to either go green or to make really efficient 3x3 plantations of different crops which shower you in money.
Overall it's not worth buying it, just go back to playing Tropico 1 thru 4.