History YMMV / Tropico

* GoddamnBats: Thanks to how schools work in 4, ''forget'' about keeping the Nationalists happy. (Basically, they hate immigrants...but you often need to hire a foreign immigrant to teach at schools to get the ball rolling, so....)
** The Nationalists usually don't get ''too'' obnoxious about immigrants unless you set your immigration office to an Open Door policy, in which case they will jump on you almost immediately after setting it to that work mode.

*** FogOfWar. Hoping to expand out quickly? Maybe you've seen something tantalising to use later and want to build a road out to it? Nope! The fog of war will stop you until you send out a squad of rangers to investigate a certain spot and (slowly) report back to base before they can be used again. In fact, this was so disliked that it was scrapped altogether by the next game.

* UncannyValley: The portrait for male rebels is quite unnerving. Hell, nearly all of the portraits for the characters are terrifying, since they've all been drawn in a horrific rendition of a political cartoon caricature. ''6'' at least dials back on the exaggeration into something more appealing.

* MagnificentBastard: El Presidente certainly shows signs of this in campaign mode. In particular, there's the Isla Desconida mission in 4, where El Presidente gets the island accepted as a European colony, then starts a communist revolution against...himself. Led by himself. To install himself as the ruler. The soviet agent and Penultimo are both pretty confused by the end.

* ThatOneSidequest: Appealing to the Environmentalists is always a huge challenge for those who want to turn a profit. Generally planting mines in areas with minerals to acquire is a necessity to get as many materials for manufacturing trade goods. Obviously, for every mine you construct pisses off the Environmentalists, resulting in constant protests from them unless you can turn their opinion of you around. It's usually for this reason that starting any further than the World Wars is a bad idea, because you need to establish your economy well enough to become sustainable, and the Environmentalists and Industrialists haven't been founded at that time. Building mines at the start of a Cold War/Modern Times era game is a good way to set off the Environmentalists immediately when you are in little to no position to do anything about it.

** Wind Turbines in 3 and 4. They don't provide that much of energy, even in most optimal spots, but you can build them ''anywhere'' and they don't require educated workforce, fuel nor huge amount of space to run. That far-away mine you would need 5 sub-stations to reach? Just build a wind turbine next to it and be done with it.

*** Housing system. In previous games, players could build whatever housing they wanted and adjust the rent so that anybody could afford it. Now, each building has a minimum pay grade requirement from tenants, meaning you have to adjust each worker's pay, and even then, some of them ''still'' won't qualify, even with the use of a special edict. This also forces players to waste more money on housing in general, along with having a large amount of the population stuck in low-tier homes, which will obviously make them unhappy.

*** Managers are a pain in the neck to both get and properly utilise. After declaring an edict, they are slowly picked from your population. They can't be hired from abroad, their trait is picked up at random and the Census edict that reveals them has ''ten years'' worth of cooldown. On top of that, by the mid-to-late game, assigning them is just tedious due to both the UI design and the sheer size of your economy by that point. Just like the FogOfWar mechanic, this mechanic was nowhere to be seen when ''6'' rolled around.

* SequelDifficultySpike: Players going from ''4'' to ''5'' may be in a shock. ''5'' is ''far'' less focused on individual people, and the game's systems changed dramatically because of it, from wealth and wages, to building management, and even to island exploration. In ''4'', it was very possible to please just about everyone with enough effort. But good luck doing that in ''5'', where the needs of each faction and the people in general are far more diverse and easily-affected by much of what you do. And the elections in ''4'' were often easily-won, commonly in landslides. Whereas in ''5'', many an election can turn out to be a serious nail-biter, to the point where enacting martial law can be ''very'' tempting. With all of this, players going from one game to the other will need to do some reacclimating as they get used to Penultimo's "Great giant tropical spiders, Presidente!".

* SequelDifficultyDrop: ''Tropico 3'' was made much easier than the first game by introducing gameplay mechanics such as cars, which reduced the FakeDifficulty frustration, though the game still provided plenty of challenge. ''Tropico 4'' dropped the difficulty massively from ''3'' however, making a tropical paradise very easy to build. Brutal dictator measures became borderline pointless, except maybe ForTheEvulz.

** Due to the limited number of lines given to Juanito, your main radio guy in Tropico 3, and due to the huge number of times he speaks, he's responsible for many.

** Both original and ''2'' had the general issue with walking being the only means of getting around. This in particular affected teamsters, making transport capacity (or lack of it) the biggest bottleneck when it comes to functionality of your island. ''3'' introduced cars and especially transport trucks to adress this, so it no longer took decades for goods to be moved from point A to B or people being unable to get to work before heading back to fulfill their needs.
** ''5'' provided few:

*** Managers are a pain in the neck to both get and properly utilise. After declaring an edict, they are slowly picked from your population. They can't be hired from abroad, their trait is picked up at random and the Census edict that reveals them has ''ten years'' worth of cooldown. On top of that, by the mid-to-late game, assigning them is just tedious due to both the UI design and the sheer size of your economy by that point.

** Cannery in original game. It can process various goods, it is small, it is cheap and could still work efficiently without electricity, while providing some of the most expensive export commodities. Most importantly, every single island can provide ''at least'' a single raw material the cannery can use and with bit of luck, all three.
** Wind turbines in 3 and 4. They don't provide that much of energy, even in most optimal spots, but you can build them ''anywhere'' and they don't require educated workforce, fuel nor huge amount of space to run. That far-away mine you would need 5 sub-stations to reach? Just build a wind turbine next to it and be done with it.
** Blimp ride is 4. Nominally, it's a tourist attraction, but one of its operating mode is "Presidental Presence" - each building it flies over acts as if El Presidente visited it, providing a massive bonus. It can "visit" multiple buildings and provide them all with bonuses at once. And it's filthy cheap to both build and operate. Just a single flight over industrial area (or even just ''farmland'') will recoup the construction cost few times thanks to the spike of exports.

*** FogOfWar. So disliked by players that it was scrapped in Tropico 6.
*** Housing system. In previous games players could build whatever house they wanted and adjust rent so anybody could afford them. Now each building has a minimal pay requirement from tenants, meaning you have to rise pays of all those workers... and some of them still won't qualify, even with a special edict. This also forces players to provide both more housing in general ''and'' having large section of the population stuck in low-tier homes, which they obviously dislike.
*** Managers are pain in the neck to both get and then properly utilise. After declaring an edict, they are slowly picked from your population. They can't be hired from abroad, their trait is picked up at random and Census edict revealing them has ''ten years'' of cooldown. On top of that, by mid-to-late game assigning them is just tedious due to the UI design and sheer size of your economy by that point.

* NightmareFace: The portrait for male rebels is quite unnerving.
** Hell, nearly all of the portraits for the characters are terrifying, since they've all been drawn in a [[UncannyValley horrific rendition of a political cartoon caricature]]. ''6'' at least dials back on the exaggeration into something more appealing.

** Hell, nearly all of the portraits for the characters are terrifying, since they've all been drawn in a [[UncannyValley horrific rendition of a political cartoon caricature]].

* ScrappyMechanic:
** 2 had the infamous housing system. Each and every pirate required their own, separate house, which aside eating space like crazy also required to be set up in as much "anarchy" spot as possible, thus far away from "order" locations, ie. every building with slaves. By mid-game, each map turned into desperate scramble to set up homes for additional crew members.
** So far, 5 provided few
*** The sole size of the maps is now a problem - they are ''much'' smaller than in previous installments, while numerous vital buildings are ''larger''.

*** Housing system. In previous games players could build whatever house they wanted and adjust rent so anybody could afford them. Now each building has a minimal pay requirement from tenants, meaning you have to rise pays of all those workers... and some of them still won't qualify. This also forces players to provide much more housing, as you can't just erect few houses with high capacity.
*** It's even more broken. For some reason even rich Tropicans prefer to live in shacks, build right next to empty Tenants or Apartments, while earning enough to easily afford (edict-lowered) costs of living inside. Then they decide to mount a revolution, based on their dissatisfied living standards...
*** Power plants are now generating much more MW than in previous parts... but the consumption is almost ten times bigger.
*** Managers are good, but the way you get them is pain in the neck. After declaring an edict, they are slowly picked from your population. They can't be hired from abroad, their trait is picked up at random and Census edict revealing them has ten years of cooldown, while after five you won't get any new information from it.
*** 1.02 patch fixed it a bit, making the edict work as intended, but it's still quite a pain to manually assign them at later stages of the game when you have too many buildings.

* HilariousInHindsight, NotSoCrazyAnymore, TruthInTelevision (The Pop Singer background was originally included for pseudo-JokeCharacter Lou Bega in the first game. Come 2010 though, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyclef_Jean and...]])

* EarWorm: Tropico 3 is ''rife'' with these. ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcdftzRX0S8&feature=related La Gata Loca]]'' is catchy in its odd, quirky way, whereas ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGLomkqW5rg&feature=related Verde Y Madure]]'' and ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3vOb0jRr0M&feature=related Asi! Vamos!]]'' take the more jackhammer-inspired approach, and...heck, about ''two-thirds'' of Tropico 3's soundtrack qualify. Made about 10 times worse if you're not a Spanish speaker yourself.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9yHcbxE3Cw Saque tu pareja con la musica tan buena, y ponte a gozar, ponte a bailar...]]
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJnLn1DJ_eE Estaba yo pensando en travesuras de la vida...]]
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCxy-4IAgzo A beber ron y cerveza, de noche hasta que amanezca...]]

** In the first game, Cabarets are only visited by men. In later games, women frequent them just as much (despite the fact that only female dancers work there).

** Blimp ride is 4. Nominally, it's a tourist attraction, but one of its operating mode is "Presidental Presence" - each building it flies over acts as if El Presidente visited it, providing a massive bonus. It can "visit" multiple buildings and provide them all with bonuses at once. And it's filthy cheap to both build and operate.