Modern Times is a DLC expansion to
Tropico 4. It gives Tropico 4 a substantial, more modern-looking facelift. The timeline has also been moved forward, concentrating more on the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Some buildings, like the market and farms, have been modernized, while other new buildings have been added, such as office and telecom buildings. Instead of the the Latin American revolution and US-Soviet cold war themes of Tropico 4, the Modern Times campaign focuses on global terror, environmentalism, the global media industry, and a shadowy organization that threatens the peace between the U.S. and Russia.
GAMEPLAY
The biggest difference between Modern Times and Tropico 4 is in basic resource production. Farms are now bio-farms, ranches are now organic ranches, and fishing wharves are now fish farms. All of these new facilities are much more productive than before. You can now operate a medium to fairly-large island (say, 300 citizens), with only one fish farm, one food crop farm, and one ranch, with plenty leftover to export. This removes one of the more tedious elements of Tropico 4, which was constantly having to monitor your food production as your population grew. In addition, mines have been upgraded to produce much more ore much faster, but they also deplete the deposit much faster, and their working radius has been greatly reduced. Logging hasn't changed.
There are dozens of other building changes in every category. More buildings require electricity, but the new solar power farm makes large amounts of electricity easier to obtain earlier in the game. The housing on the high end has been upgraded, but the low-end housing, like tenements, country houses, bunkhouses, etc. is exactly the same, and nothing new was added in the middle. For me, this tended to create more of a "the haves vs. the have-nots" situation in housing than I had in Tropico 4, but I got used to it. Transportation has been improved with the addition of metro stations, which act, for our purposes, like a network of teleporter nodes. The military now includes SWAT soldiers, which are like police that can fight in the army. (Police, soldiers, and generals still exist, too.)
Modern Times also gives El Presidente some new edicts to issue, such as one that lets health facilities - which include a new, pay-as-you-enter sanitarium - double their capacity. These new edicts don't require another minister.
I found that once you get past your first 3-5 years and get your production going and all of the basic services up and running, it is a lot easier to keep your economy going. Generally, by the tenth year of any scenario, I had more money in the treasury than I could ever spend, so I was using "quick build" even on really high-end buildings, importing college-educated citizens by the boatload, and buying a lot of stuff just to see what it would do. Ordinarily, I would say the game became too easy, but after grinding through so many missions of Tropico 4 with a constant -$10,000 treasury deficit, I enjoyed being able to make things happen without having to wait for the next foreign aid installment.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Modern Times has ten achievements. They are all easy. None are missable, and none are grindy. In fact, due to the much greater economic flexibility you have in Modern Times, several of the main games achievements, like
and
, are a snap to obtain with the DLC, whereas in plain Tropico 4, they can be time-consuming.
GRIPES
I have two complaints about Modern Times. The first may be only a quibble, but it seems like the developers were in a very cynical mood when they designed the new buildings. The new supermarkets sell three kinds of food - unhealthy junk food, bland "gruel", and terrible-tasting health food. Similarly, the new diamond cathedral and telecom HQ have three different work modes, all three of which seem designed to exploit people or make them miserable. I know that when a lot of people play Tropico, they enjoy putting themselves in "evil dictator" mode, but I actually like to pretend that El Presidente is competent and has good intentions, so this force-fed cynicism turned me off. A bigger problem is that two of the characters from Tropico 4 - Sunny Flowers and Miss Pineapple - have new voice actresses, and they sound NOTHING like the old ones. The really bad part is, much of the dialogue is repeated from Tropico 4, in the old actresses voices, so it constantly switches back and forth. Stuff like this annoys me.
KUDOS
As someone who enjoyed Tropico 3, I was somewhat disappointed in Tropico 4. I felt like they didn't introduce enough new content to make it deserving of being a new title. I saw the same ratty markets in both games, the exact same eight housing options in both games, exactly the same crops and farming, and so on. I think they pulled it off, though, with the Modern Times DLC. Tropico 4 + Modern Times is what Tropico 4 should have been. Of course, if you liked Tropico 4 a lot, I have no doubt that you'll love Modern Times. But if you were underwhelmed by Tropico 4, like I was, consider giving Modern Times a try. You might end up liking Tropico 4 after all.
4.0