Absurdist dictator simulator Tropico 6 was released in March and is only receiving its first paid DLC now. Developers Limbic Entertainment have been busy however, with a series of free updates over the last several months, the seventh of which, the Seguridad Social update, coincides with the release of this DLC.

Said DLC is called The Llama of Wall Street, and yes that is a Wolf of Wall Street gag. It's time for El Presidente to go financial, with the new Trade Institute building enabling stock market manipulation. (Other new buildings added by this expansion are the Toy Workshop and Smart Furniture Studio.) There are also various new random events and "Expanded gameplay mechanics mean goods are now subject to price fluctuations, trade impacts and trends."

The Seguridad Social update meanwhile adds warehouses, another sandbox map called Rio, and the Social Security edict. Both are out now.

Tropico 6 is a great game for people watching. It's a satirical city builder in which every one of the citizens of your banana republic is simulated. You place a mine. You watch as a construction crew makes its way over to the building site. You watch as the newly constructed mine's employees start digging for gold or coal or uranium or whatever. And you watch as teamsters come to take the raw materials to a factory for processing.

When it's all going well, there's a calming rhythm to the bustle of your island. When it's not, you find yourself scouring around the map, trying to diagnose problems. Why hasn't the mine been built? Why are the workers off-site? Why haven't the goods been transported? Why is the processing plant out of raw materials? Why isn't the shipment at the docks? The next cargo ship won't arrive for six months, and if I don't complete this trading order soon the Axis forces are going to declare war on me because of the time I used them as a scapegoat to win an election.

The focused, individualised simulation means that small inefficiencies can balloon into big problems, and the behaviour of your citizens feeds back into wider systems in interesting ways. That's why—while there is a sandbox mode with plenty of different islands and options—often the Tropico series is at its best during the campaign missions, where specific requirements force you to adapt.

In sandbox, you can go slow, sensibly growing your island, diligently pursuing new financial ventures, effectively placating political factions and superpowers. You have the space and freedom to effectively manage your growth as you progress through the different eras. But the missions – presented as an anthology of past adventures, narrated by your trusty aide Penultimo – throw in entertaining curveballs to overcome.

Each focuses on a different aspect of the game, be it the spread of propaganda, the challenges of mass tourism, the balancing act of international relations, or the benefits of light piracy. The latter is one of the most entertaining. Starting on an island with virtually no natural resources, you're required to pillage raw materials to then manufacture into more profitable goods. The raid system is a powerful new tool, essentially gifting a regular trickle of goods, immigrants and, in later eras, beneficial propaganda and even falsified tourist reviews. Having to create supply chains that aren't supported by local crops is a meaningful twist on a standard campaign.

If there's a downside to raids, it's that there's no major downside. Foreign powers have traditionally taken a dim view to piracy, but in this, a game that specifically pokes fun at international relations, it just doesn't come up. You do at least get a negative reputation modifier for stealing famed national monuments like Saint Basil's Cathedral or The /actual White House/, but it's easy to mitigate and goes entirely unremarked upon when said nation next gets in touch to demand you complete some petty task.

Some missions aren't as successful. One, in which El Presidente launches a grand experiment to abolish housing, sounded promising, but in practice just meant working around the negative opinion modifier that poor housing confers. Citizens can protest and even rebel, but, just like superpowers, they're too easy to placate—even when they don't have a roof over their head.

Where the missions excel, however, it's in forcing you to take actions that can upset the delicate balance of economic growth. If political strife always feels manageable, financial ruin is a more immediate danger, especially when progressing through to a new era. A few times I've gone from comfortable profit to uncontrollable decline, as upkeep and wages outgrew my production thanks to some ridiculous request from a faction leader.

Tonally, Tropico is almost too broad and bawdy to be considered satire, but the over-the-top absurdity does lead to some fun mission requests that feed comedy into mechanics. In one, for instance, the communists instruct me to dismantle religion, banks and mansions. This leads to outrage from the Capitalists. The only thing that can placate them? Building a golf course.

Tropico 6 was developed by new series stewards Limbic Entertainment, but you'd be hard pressed to know by just playing the game. It takes Tropico 5's era system, reintroduces Tropico 4's political speeches and work modes, and adds in a few new features designed to complicate supply chains and diversify systems. It looks a bit nicer – the Tropico series has always been very pretty – and the archipelagoes, bridges and tunnels add a few neat wrinkles to construction. That's about it.

Ultimately, this is still a series about people watching. The builder. The miner. The teamster. The factory worker. I've been watching these people perform the same tasks since I first encountered the series with Tropico 3. I'll probably watch them for many, many hours to come.

When last we heard from Tropico 6, the latest addition to the long-running banana republic despotocracy sim, it had suffered an unfortunate delay from its scheduled launch in January to late March. With that release now roughly three weeks away, Kalypso Media has announced that fans, and those who might be, can take part in an open beta which is actually underway right now. 

We took a look at Tropico 6 late last year and found it familiar in many ways—the Tropico series has been around since 2001—despite being the work of a new developer. But it also expands the game into a multi-island archipelago, and sharpens the fidelity of the simulated world: Productivity of individual buildings will rise and fall based on the presence of workers, for instance, so it's important to ensure that they can get to and from their workplaces quickly and easily. 

The open beta will include the full tutorial and all eras (although the modern era will be limited to the tutorial), six missions, 11 sandbox maps, and multiplayer for up to four players. English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian languages are supported.   

You're going to have to move quickly if you want to get in on the free El Presidente action: The open beta only runs until March 8. Preordering either version of the game on Steam will extend beta access all the way to launch, however, so if you really dig it, you can keep on playing as long as you're willing to commit. Tropico 6 comes out on March 29. 

Tropico 6, originally due out this month, has been pushed back to March, so you’ll need to put your plans for a new banana republic on the back-burner. After running a closed beta last year, Kalypso and Limbic decided to delay launch to give them more time to implement feedback and polish up the management sim. 

“Over the holidays, I have played Tropico 6 for many hours and really liked what I saw,” Kalypso managing director Simon Hellwig wrote in a letter to the community. “But, in my humble opinion, it is not enough to like a game—I want to love it! And Tropico 6 is good, but not very good, or outstanding. Yet.

“Combining my own opinion and the response we had from thousands of dedicated beta players around the world, Kalypso has decided to postpone the release of the game for another couple of months to March 29, 2019.”

Features getting an extra layer of polish include pathfinding, multiplayer and the simulation of both Tropicans and the economy. The latter was one of the big things Kalypso and Limbic were touting when I previewed Tropico 6 for the magazine. The lives of your Tropicans will interfere more with your plans as they go about their routine and develop expectations or set themselves goals. It’s an expansion of a system that has, in previous Tropicos, been a lot more abstract. 

Despite the enhanced simulation and new archipelagos, it’s still familiar. 

“Ultimately, Tropico 6 doesn't feel like a revolutionary new direction for the series.” Phil said in our latest preview. “Instead, it's positioning itself as a definitive version—reintroducing elements removed from Tropico 5 such as election speeches and work modes, as well as tweaking and expanding key systems to offer more options and new ways to define how you want to play. But, while never groundbreaking, having a larger canvas to create on—and the infrastructural additions that archipelagos provide—does make a difference.”

Because of the delay, if you preordered Tropico 6, or do so by 8pm CET on January 10, via the official shop, Steam or other digital stores, you’ll receive the first DLC for free. The DLC due out later this year. 

The problem with a series about building on an island is that, sooner or later, you're going to run out of island. Previous Tropico games could, at times, feel pretty limiting. Not only were you surrounded on all sides by clear blue ocean, but even within your verdant, tropical paradise, mountains and cliffs would often restrict your ability to expand.

Not so in Tropico 6. In many ways this sequel will be familiar to Tropico fans, despite it having a new developer—Might & Magic's Limbic Entertainment—at the helm. But for all that's the same, a few new features should help alleviate any claustrophobia. "We figured for El Presidente, one island wasn't enough," says lead level designer Mark Mussler, "so we wanted to provide him with a bigger playground to operate in." Each mission will now take place on an archipelago—with one main landmass surrounded by smaller satellite islands.

"It perfectly fit into the Tropico theme because it underlines this tropical Caribbean atmosphere," says Mussler. "But of course we also wanted to ensure we gave the player meaningful ways to engage with the archipelagos and new islands." This is primarily achieved through resource distribution. In one of the maps I'm shown, certain resources like iron and gold are limited to a satellite island, forcing players to create mines far away from their main settlement.

As in previous games, each Tropican is simulated, and so they won't just magically appear in the place you need them to be. That means you need to connect your islands together, either physically, through bridges, or by providing public transport. By building a landing dock and teamster port, citizens will be able to take boats between islands, and resources can easily be transported to your main dock.

In Tropico 6, however, the simulation is being pushed further than ever. In Tropico 5, workers had a permanent effect on the production output of their workplace, even if they were weren't physically in the building. Here, though, workers will clock in and out of their job, and the productivity of each building will reflect that. "Production buildings will only operate when workers are on site," says Mussler. "That's why it's so important, especially in Tropico 6 with the archipelagos, to ensure that travel times are as short and efficient as possible."

Efficiency has always been an element of the Tropico series to an extent. I've spent many hours in previous games waiting for construction crews to reach the site of my next development project. But, with satellite islands forcing Tropicans to travel longer distances, developing good infrastructure is more important than ever. Even if you connect all of your islands with bridges, only the richest Tropicans are able to run cars—unless you spend $1,000 per month on the Free Wheels edict. If you're not prepared to do that you can build bus stations instead, but it'll be on you to create routes that will get your workers where they need to go.

In a mission I played in the beta build, I found it more useful to grow small communities around key businesses on satellite islands. Away from the main city, a small logging settlement emerged, focused on felling trees and turning the logs into planks that could be exported. The businesses required workers, which meant building houses, and the residents required services and entertainment, which meant more businesses. It's not a major new direction for the series, but I enjoyed creating these specialised ad-hoc communities.

Many of Tropico 6's new features are simple in nature, but let you make the most of the space available on each map. Tunnels, for instance, let you extend roads through mountains—reaching otherwise inaccessible parts of the map. And teleferics can transport Tropicans up to hills and plateaus, letting you build at different elevations. Not all options will be available at the start of each mission, though. As in Tropico 5, you'll need to progress through different eras—from the colonial era to modern day—with new building options, edicts and research unlocking as you progress. And even when you've hit the relevant time period, you'll need to spend money to unlock blueprints for more advanced buildings.

Tropico 6 will launch with 15 story missions, and each mission map can also be played in sandbox mode (on top of a further 15 maps exclusively designed for sandbox play). Based on what I've seen, each seems to have some interesting wrinkle designed to make you engage with various systems. In one mission I'm shown, titled Bureaucracy, various edicts are randomly activated by the AI. This forces players to react to the consequences of political decisions made outside of your control—be it loss of faction standing, additional expense, or, to pick a specific example, the loss of productivity that results from enforced siestas.

Another mission sees El Presidente attempt a grand experiment to create a city free of houses—forcing citizens to live in tents and shacks. There's no great story to the campaign—it's an anthology of absurd scenarios, filtered through the series' typical broad, politically charged humour, but the best seem designed specifically to subvert the city-building genre in fun ways.

Even in sandbox modes, the design of the archipelagos will force players to get creative at times. Many will be missing vital resources, requiring you to source them from elsewhere. This can be done in a number of ways, either through trading, or via the new raid system. Create a raid building—such as a pirate cove—and you'll be able to spend raid points to send a crew out on missions to steal the things you need. You can loot a variety of raw materials, or even send out a rescue party to gather new citizens.

Raid buildings also let you trigger a heist—an ongoing mission to steal world wonders from other nations. "When you activate a heist it basically unlocks a quest that the player needs to fulfil in order to ensure that the people you send out to steal the buildings can actually achieve it," explains Mussler. "It does take a while to accomplish that, but the thing with world wonders is they're not just a gimmicky thing that look cool."

Mussler's island, for instance, is the new home of Saint Basil's Cathedral, which used to live in Moscow. Its bonus means that whenever a citizen gains or loses faith happiness, their other happiness aspects are all affected by the same amount. In practice, it means, as long as Saint Basil owners focus on giving Tropicans access to churches and cathedrals, and fulfil requests made by the religious faction leader, they can mitigate the happiness penalties that occur for poor food quality, high crime or insufficient healthcare.

Each wonder offers a different bonus. The Statue of Liberty, for example, ensures that all tourists arrive with 100% happiness and in full support of El Presidente—a boon that I'm not sure is shared with its real life counterpart. The Great Pyramid of Giza, meanwhile, increases the construction rate of each worker. Presumably the countries that used to own these wonders will have something to say about their removal, but that's all part of the fun of Tropico's geopolitical tensions.

In addition to having to placate various political faction leaders and superpowers, as well as your own citizens, El Presidente can, once again, go into business for himself—siphoning off money and diverting it into his Swiss bank account. This is something I've always wanted to see expanded in a Tropico game—the series is great at offering ways to abuse your power, but hasn't always provided a good reason to do so. In Tropico 6, though, your Swiss money can be given to a broker in exchange for a variety of favours.

If you're about to lose an election, for example, you can pay your broker to launch an image campaign. "When elections come up, and if you identify you're not doing well, this is a short term thing," says Mussler. "It won't help you in the long run but at least it can get you past an election." The broker can also be used to effectively cancel a political faction request without suffering a reputation penalty. Beyond these specifics, though, you can also exchange Swiss money for resources—either research, cash, raid points or new immigrants.

Ultimately, Tropico 6 doesn't feel like a revolutionary new direction for the series. Instead, it's positioning itself as a definitive version—reintroducing elements removed from Tropico 5 such as election speeches and work modes, as well as tweaking and expanding key systems to offer more options and new ways to define how you want to play. But, while never groundbreaking, having a larger canvas to create on—and the infrastructural additions that archipelagoes provide—does make a difference. Will it be enough to make Tropico 6 a must play? Limbic is hoping you'll vote yes.

Kalypso has let loose the beta of Tropico 6, but only for those who pre-order the game through its shop. A Steam beta was announced in August, but that doesn't have a date yet. 

Due out in January 2019, Tropico 6 is the latest entry in the series, but has a different developer than the last three games, with German developers Limbic Entertainment taking over instead of Bulgaria’s Haemimont Games. The newest entry in the series highlights a few key features, such as the major series shakeup of multi-island archipelagos that emphasize transit networks including bridges, tunnels, and public transit. 

Tropico 6 returns to a greater focus on the player’s character—the dictator El Presidente—with customizable outfits, palaces, election speeches, and the like. These features, of course, return alongside classic city-builder series gameplay like managing imports, building housing, and having dissenters shot in the street.

Also, there’s this entirely absurd live action trailer about it:

Tropico 6 is due to release January 29th, 2019. It’s in the Kalypso store here and on Steam if you'd rather wait for the beta.