I hope the jails are utilized better.

I suggest some way of your police arresting people (without me telling them). Perhaps people causing crime or living in houses that cause crime. I dont know....Crime rate, police, jails need to do more on their own. In my opinion.

good point since I have yet to find even a single use for jails over the entire scenario campaign. there were a few that marked off parties of dissidents, so I built them thinking great, this is the perfect time to throw some citizens in jail. then any attempt to arrest even one led to the entire party turning rebel? useless. what good is tropico when corrupt police have no power to bend the will of your people by throwing them in jail, it's not enough for them to be used just for one or two misbehaved faction leaders here and there, since this can be solved in so many other ways.

I was always under the impression that the police station had some sort of jail, so the guy who gets into a fight down at the pub spends the night in the drunk tank, like on Andy Griffith. The prison is to advance your political motives, but I agree it's not very effective, although sometimes I do arrest all the homeless people and ship them off the island.

The police presence seems to be not much more than an overlay like the radio station range. I remember in T1 if you didn't have enough police, the spring breakers could get out of hand. One scenario you had to get 150 spring breakers at a time on the island, I had one cop and they tore down a pub and most of a cheap motel before I could hire enough cops. There should be more obvious crime in the game, like people getting murdered and tourists getting robbed, and tourists getting out of hand.

you could probably exploit the jail system, if you wanted to be a total dictator, by creating minorities and majorities within you game. For example having all the militarist, on your side and creating more by selecting the military education for both college and high school. appeasing the communist also seem pretty easy, and the religious faction seems relatively easy to appease. Thus you could still win elections quite easily, and if not outright you could use bribes, rig the election, and at least win by a smaller margin.

Furthermore you could assassinate the smaller factions. However, i have not done to much of this as i dont like ruling with fear and total brutality.

Remember, elections do not need to be held if you instill martial law, and if you keep your military happy you essentially become a militant dictator state, and can say "FU", to all the people you dislike.

Jail's are fun. If you're trying to get an uprising going, sticking the faction leaders in there will help.

I have attempted to run a prison island, making money purely from the hard back breaking labour of my prisoners, and paying everyone else pratically nothing. However, it would be good if you could set a time period for the prisoners sentences as replacing your workforce every 5 years gets very tedious.

It would also be neat if you could not just "reeducate" your prisoners to like you, but also to change factions. Let's say your prisoner is a moderate religious supporter (+), you could then "reeducate" him to become a die-hard communist supporter (+++) etc...

I thought the prison should take the rebels that survive the attacks, and after the 5 years (if you did not ship them out) you can have them re-enter the population or allow them to return to the "rebel pool." But this could be too complex?

The jail definitely needs more of a purpose then "Convict political prisoners".

I'll repeat my own suggestions on the matter, if anyone's interested:

(10-03-2010 06:49 AM)Praetyre Wrote:  New Crime Mechanics: Some citizens, below a certain level of happiness, will commit criminal acts. These acts include vandalism (which reduces the beauty of a structure), arson (which destroys buildings), murder (exactly what it says on the tin), theft (which steals some of the income of a building), embezzlement (where employees pocket some of the money their building makes), bombings (exactly what it says on the tin) and assault (reduces happiness and health scores of citizens). Policemen will automatically round up and incarcerate criminals, who must be kept in Prisons, thus giving a practical and realistic function for prisons outside of political internment. Issuing the Arrest edict on criminals has a quarter of the effect on family respect and no effect on bystanders.

Unlike games like the City Building Series where criminals were spawned people who represented levels of unrest in your population (pickpocketing, mugging, vandalism and arson, for example), criminals would be just be regular folk with incentives to commit criminal acts, across the whole social strata (anywhere from farmers who pocket the crops for themselves to bureaucrats who spend their days playing Solitaire to bankers who embezzle El Presidente's Swiss fund).

It would be kind of like Startopia, where you had aliens come aboard who would be criminals and impersonate employees (or your employees could become criminals themselves) and perform actions like stealing credits from the recycler that ordinarily would have gone to your account, make people feel worse in medical and religious services and make your security center malfunction, in contrast to the spies, who would just assassinate visitors and plant bombs.

You could rehabilitate them for money, kill them, send them off the station or even let them off with a slap on the wrist or try and cure them with religion, but any way you slice it, dealing with them was important. I'd like to see Tropico working the same way. Though, obviously, death would be a bit different (you'd probably be able to administer the Eliminate edict for half the normal penalty to family and none to bystanders for a murderer (be he someone who murdered regularily or through bombing).

Another element of challenge that could be added would be a risk of prisoners killing each other and causing riots and escape attempts due to overcrowding once your prison reaches 4 or more people, with the chance steadily growing as it reaches capacity. This would also create incentives to build ahead of capacity with your prisons (they rarely get beyond 2, even with Arrest-happy Presidente's) and interesting new manners of getting rid of troublesome citizens without the one-time Florida edict. Of course, them dying in your prisons would piss off the family, and probably decrease your respect with the Intellectual faction as well and your healthcare score. You could buy an electric security system to reduce the risk of escapes but at the cost of higher maintenace and required electricity. Would certainly add some spice to those Jailhouse Rock-style scenarios.

that sounds good ^
i hope they bring that to xbox, i only ever used prisons once for the achievement to jail 10 of em
othr than that i dont see the point wasting the money