Hi all,

Am new to Tropico 3 and really can't understand the finance aspect. Looking at my yearly balance according the Economy tab on my almanac, I should have an estimated $6K surplus for the yet, and my outgoings are less than my income.

Yet, my budget figure onscreen (bottom left) shows it plummeting by $2K a month.

One thing I note is that I'm losing money on farming (1K a year). Any idea why that is happpening?

However, that is more than balanced by the fact I'm making 14K a year from logging.

Any help appreciated,

P.

(27-05-2010 08:34 PM)oceanclub Wrote:  Hi all,

Am new to Tropico 3 and really can't understand the finance aspect. Looking at my yearly balance according the Economy tab on my almanac, I should have an estimated $6K surplus for the yet, and my outgoings are less than my income.

The almanac's figures are sometimes a bit detached from reality because it goes off the calendar year, which isn't how Tropico works. You're very much a freighter to freighter economy, and the freighters come pretty much when they feel like it. In the meantime, you are stuck paying upkeep and wages. Sure, you have 'profits' at the docks, but that doesn't mean squat until the freighter pulls in.

Quote:One thing I note is that I'm losing money on farming (1K a year). Any idea why that is happpening?

Food crops (Corn, Banana, Papaya, and Pineapple) are all eaten by your population to keep them alive and healthy. This generates no profit and so your farms can't claim a gain even though you paid the farmers wages and paid the farm itself upkeep to produce the good. Corn especially is almost always unprofitable. Even if you have enough of a surplus to export some, the price is so low that your chances of exceeding both wages and upkeep are hilariously low.

The trick to farming early on is to grow enough corn to roughly feed your population, then half that again in tropical fruits to fill in the gaps and give you some extra income. Balance that with inedible cash crops like sugar and tobacco to give you the base you need to launch yourself into the industrial era.

After you get some good income coming from industry, your margins from pure farming will be very small and the benefit behind growing corn will be miniscule. Most players I speak to stop growing corn completely after the industrial sector is booming, simply because it's very rare for ONLY corn to grow on a plot of land, and it's more profitable to grow anything that's not corn. This is doubly true for Pineapple, which can be processed at a Cannery and sold for a hilarious price.

Quote:However, that is more than balanced by the fact I'm making 14K a year from logging.

Channel some of that into a high school, then build a lumber mill near the dock. Trust me.

(27-05-2010 08:51 PM)ThunderClaw Wrote:  The trick to farming early on is to grow enough corn to roughly feed your population, then half that again in tropical fruits to fill in the gaps and give you some extra income. Balance that with inedible cash crops like sugar and tobacco to give you the base you need to launch yourself into the industrial era.

how the hell do you do tht with one farm, i thought that if you changed produce they would no longer grow corn

(27-05-2010 09:40 PM)FreddyJW Wrote:  how the hell do you do tht with one farm, i thought that if you changed produce they would no longer grow corn

This is true. You can, however, have multiple farms.

(27-05-2010 08:51 PM)ThunderClaw Wrote:  The almanac's figures are sometimes a bit detached from reality because it goes off the calendar year, which isn't how Tropico works. You're very much a freighter to freighter economy, and the freighters come pretty much when they feel like it. In the meantime, you are stuck paying upkeep and wages. Sure, you have 'profits' at the docks, but that doesn't mean squat until the freighter pulls in.

Ah, OK... So I should just wait for a year or 2 'til I've built up the cash before I attempt to build anything else?

Quote:The trick to farming early on is to grow enough corn to roughly feed your population

Ah, OK; how do I know how much to grow?

Also, I think I'm already mainly growing fruit and cash crops anyway... is there any way of quickly telling how many types of each farm I have, without having to click on each one?


[/quote]
Channel some of that into a high school, then build a lumber mill near the dock. Trust me.
[/quote]

Ah, I don't appear to be able to build lumber mills yet...

P.

(27-05-2010 10:37 PM)oceanclub Wrote:  Ah, OK... So I should just wait for a year or 2 'til I've built up the cash before I attempt to build anything else?

Not necessarily. There's nothing wrong with debt, I routinely spend down to -5000 or -7000 in my first wave of buildings. The goal is to get what's called a structural profit - that is, routinely make more money than you spend. Routine costs are things like upkeep and wages - the recurring, constant costs. Routine profits are things like exports - routine, stable incomes. "One time" costs are things like construction.

One time costs are always good if they give you a bigger structural profit. Farms, logging camps, and anything else that makes money, therefore, is pretty much always good.

Quote:Ah, OK; how do I know how much to grow?

The old rule of thumb from Tropico 1 was that 1 farm will feed 40 people, but in Tropico 3 it appears to be far more. The way I handle it is that I plant 1 farm for every plant early on, then add 2-3 more for every couple hundred citizens I get. If I can't plant one plant reasonably (Tobacco is a PAIN) then I'll fall back to Pineapple. So sometimes I'll have, you know, 3 Pineapple farms if Banana and Tobacco are both being a pain.

Quote:Also, I think I'm already mainly growing fruit and cash crops anyway... is there any way of quickly telling how many types of each farm I have, without having to click on each one?

No.

Quote:Ah, I don't appear to be able to build lumber mills yet...

P.

Are you playing an early campaign mission?

(27-05-2010 10:37 PM)oceanclub Wrote:  Ah, OK; how do I know how much to grow?

Also, I think I'm already mainly growing fruit and cash crops anyway... is there any way of quickly telling how many types of each farm I have, without having to click on each one?

Check your almanac, if your exporting corn/bananas your making enough to support your population.

And as far as i know, you'll have to click each one, however you could just cycle through the ground overlays and look near each green area. If you'v got a farm near a large green banana soil area, you can guess it'll be a banana farm etc.

If You cant grow tobacco or sugar - good crop making good cash in export is coffe, especially when big amuont of cofee is processed by canneries into dried coffe which gives good income in docks, when freighter takes it away.

I usually build new caneries if every cannery on island has typically over 1000 units input stock, so goods flow from farms to canneries and later to docks gives me good profit. And dont forget to build teamsters offices close to big production sites, so goods are transported quickly and there is no stoppage in this production chain.

(28-05-2010 11:03 AM)flux Wrote:  If You cant grow tobacco or sugar - good crop making good cash in export is coffe, especially when big amuont of cofee is processed by canneries into dried coffe which gives good income in docks, when freighter takes it away.

Are canneries worth the price? I've seen positive and negative comments about them. Possibly the positive and negative comments are due to the fact people don't have enough teamsters/garages to support them?

Quote:And dont forget to build teamsters offices close to big production sites, so goods are transported quickly and there is no stoppage in this production chain.

On that note; do I need to have a road _right_ beside each farm, or can I get away with have farms 2 or 3 even three deep away from the roads? There appear to be only some buildings where you _must_ have road right beside them, indicated by arrows (red if unconnected, green if connected) - is that right?

Also, to avoid congestion, should I mix farms and housing? Currently, I've been trying to keep farms on one side of the maps and everything else (churches, entertainment,etc) on the other, with teamster office and garages interspersed. My logic - and I'm not sure is this right - is that items like churches and entertainment only need to be near the person's residence, not their place of work. So, have denser residences means I need fewer churchs, etc. Is this correct?

P.

(28-05-2010 12:59 PM)oceanclub Wrote:  Are canneries worth the price? I've seen positive and negative comments about them. Possibly the positive and negative comments are due to the fact people don't have enough teamsters/garages to support them?

The punch line here is yes, canneries are worth it, but they're not 'extremely' worth it.

Canneries are not generally going to make you wildly wealthy. They can, but typically an island's back-breaking money maker is something like Rum or Furniture or Oil. That's the complaint most people have that I've heard; they're a rather big ticket item to build and staff but they're not a massive moneymaker until freeze-dried coffee (which requires electricity).

On the other hand, any island can come up with pineapple, fish, or coffee. I have yet to see a single game where an island outright couldn't produce all three of those products. On the flip side, I've seen many games where it isn't really feasible to grow a ton of sugar or tobacco (for Rum and Cigars).

So yes, canneries are definitely worth it. Put them right near the dock and give them their own Teamster office to make sure they get serviced properly (though don't be afraid to restrict the Teamster office to half or even quarter staff while the industrial sector gets fired up).

Quote:On that note; do I need to have a road _right_ beside each farm, or can I get away with have farms 2 or 3 even three deep away from the roads?

Yep. You can build them 2 or 3 deep if you want, though I don't recommend that since it's a lot more walking for your Teamsters.

Quote:There appear to be only some buildings where you _must_ have road right beside them, indicated by arrows (red if unconnected, green if connected) - is that right?

You got it. It doesn't even, strictly speaking, NEED to be attached to a road, it's just not good sense for it not to be.

Quote:Also, to avoid congestion, should I mix farms and housing?

This is a very lively and ongoing discussion. Check this thread and ask whatever questions you need there. I have an example of my most recent island up there, which has very high population density and no major traffic problems, but on huge islands like the one I have you could feasibly do a "tropican suburbia" and use Houses to make a more distributed and less congested street pattern. Complaint with that is that USSR Dev Aid doesn't help Houses.

Quote:So, have denser residences means I need fewer churchs, etc. Is this correct?

Not really. Yes, you're increasing the maximum realistic capacity of these support buildings because people have to go shorter distances to get to them, so the total overhead of going to the building, but when you're talking about Religion, Healthcare, and Fun, you're still going to need a ton of everything. In the island I have pictured in the traffic topic I have 1 church and 4 cathedrals and I still see complaints about not being able to find religious services on the island.

You're still going to need a ton of everything to satiate demand, which is the larger challenge of high-density designs. It's not so much the housing, that tessellates together really well. It's incorporating the large and irregularly shaped support buildings that will kill you.

Thanks; this is all very helpful. Just some earlier comments I missed:

Quote:Channel some of that into a high school, then build a lumber mill near the dock. Trust me.

I actually already have a high school, which incidentally has a full complement of teacher for very few pupils (and there's plenty of kids on the island) - that's another thing that confuses me. Any reason they're not going to school?

Quote:Are you playing an early campaign mission?

I think I'm only on the very first part of the campaign - export $80,000 (or around that) worth of food.

P.

(28-05-2010 05:29 PM)oceanclub Wrote:  I actually already have a high school, which incidentally has a full complement of teacher for very few pupils (and there's plenty of kids on the island) - that's another thing that confuses me. Any reason they're not going to school?

Children don't go to high school in Tropico - adults do. They graduate in anywhere from a few months to about a year, depending on the student's intelligence and the skill of the teachers. +Learning Speed bonuses, such as from the Learning With Larry TV station, the Literacy Program edict, and intrinsics from Presidente shorten the time a student must learn, as does a visit to the school from El Presidente.

Graduation from high school does nothing for the Tropican unless there is a work position open that requires a high school diploma; it's just a piece of paper otherwise. Therefore, if you don't have any positions open that require a high school diploma, nobody will attend school.

College-educated jobs later down the line work the same way.

Children are educated at Grade Schools, which was a building added with Absolute Power. However, they have rather dubious usefulness right now because children must remain at the Grade School until they mature to adults, which can take 10+ years depending on when they enter the system. While realistic, when you combine this with the Grade School's large foundation footprint and relatively low capacity you end up needing a frightening amount of space to educate even half of your Child population.

Also, in early campaign missions, a number of buildings are disabled, so yeah that explains that. I thought you were playing a sandbox.

Actually, here's an odd thing; when I check the Score page of my almanac, I have 100% score in my scenario. How do I proceed to the next one?

P

(29-05-2010 12:51 AM)oceanclub Wrote:  Actually, here's an odd thing; when I check the Score page of my almanac, I have 100% score in my scenario. How do I proceed to the next one?

P

Just quit and open up the Campaign map again. It should have marked it as complete/opened new maps.

(27-05-2010 10:37 PM)oceanclub Wrote:  

(27-05-2010 08:51 PM)ThunderClaw Wrote:  The almanac's figures are sometimes a bit detached from reality because it goes off the calendar year, which isn't how Tropico works. You're very much a freighter to freighter economy, and the freighters come pretty much when they feel like it. In the meantime, you are stuck paying upkeep and wages. Sure, you have 'profits' at the docks, but that doesn't mean squat until the freighter pulls in.

Ah, OK... So I should just wait for a year or 2 'til I've built up the cash before I attempt to build anything else?

Quote:The trick to farming early on is to grow enough corn to roughly feed your population

Ah, OK; how do I know how much to grow?

Also, I think I'm already mainly growing fruit and cash crops anyway... is there any way of quickly telling how many types of each farm I have, without having to click on each one?

Channel some of that into a high school, then build a lumber mill near the dock. Trust me.
[/quote]

Ah, I don't appear to be able to build lumber mills yet...

P.
[/quote]

You can check the overlay tab, and look at each type of crop to see how many of each farm you have. I usually try to have one of each food source (farms, fish, cattles & goats) this will feed a good sized population. You can look at your economy tab to see if foods being shipped out & people--> food quality to see if anyone is skipping meals. Also build atleast one market near a garage, this will fight starvation and spped up the amount of time it takes people to get food.

Don't do the logging industry! It pisses off the environmentalist & destroys the beauty of your island. The best economic approach is this:

Pause game immediatly, check your overlay map (on mini map near avatar select) See where you can build mines. Build a road to the area, a garage (make it so only 1 person can work in garage) and then build the mine (use construction priority to build garage first)

After you get your mines placed, look for any oil resources you can build a well on & exploit those.

After mines & Oil, you can set up cigar industry (2 tobacco farms & a cigar factory all clumped together) If the land isn't suitable for tobacco, do sugar & rum.

Don't build a cannery! The game will export canned food and let your citezins starv!

You can also set up a tourist industry, which will help to balance out the peaks and valley's in your economy from frieghters!

(29-05-2010 05:41 PM)sdu754 Wrote:  Don't build a cannery! The game will export canned food and let your citezins starv!

Your citizens get first crack at food before it's used for other purposes. If this sort of thing was a real problem you'd have issues with ALL farms because it would go straight to the dock.

Don't spread this malarkey.