GATHERING OF DEVELOPERS ANNOUNCES "TROPICO 2: PIRATE COVE"

Let's Get Ready to Plunder!

Sequel to Best-Selling "Tropico" is a Pirate Simulation Complete with Captives, Wenches, and the Famous Blackbeard

"We're taking Tropico in a new direction," said Rachel Bernstein, president of Frog City Software. "It's still the Caribbean, but now the player rules an island teeming with pirates, complete with the management of captives, rum supply, and parrot aviaries."

About "Tropico 2: Pirate Cove" As an all-powerful Pirate King, players must manage a seventeenth century band of buccaneers in "Tropico 2: Pirate Cove." To attract the most frightening of history's sea-faring bad boys, Pirate Kings must keep their charges brave and well-supplied between voyages. The island's "yo-ho-ho's" must stay at a feverish pitch in order to keep the King and his buccaneers satisfied with drinking, wenching, gambling, feasting, and the best in pirate accommodations.

Success in "Tropico 2: Pirate Cove" depends on careful management of the pirate population. As dead men earn no plunder, the King must keep his pirates well equipped for potentially lethal missions. Sea dogs require muskets, cutlasses, cannons, and the skills to use them when they venture forth to plunder the Spanish Main. Pirates equipped with a parrot on their shoulders and a scary black hat are more likely to strike fear into their victims' hearts.

Three Big Changes to "Tropico" Model "Tropico 2" features several major innovations to the original "Tropico" game. The traditional economic model is reversed: the player maintains their wealth not by production of materials, but by plundering merchants on the high seas and bringing the victims back to the island as captive workers. In addition, the pirate characters show a great deal of individual personality, so that the player becomes truly vested in the characters' well-being. The island is also zoned so that richer pirates may sequester themselves in their own booty-filled mansions, which automatically upgrade as their standards of living improve.

"Tropico 2: Pirate Cove" stars Blackbeard and other pirates based loosely on historical figures, organized in a campaign that takes the pirates through 100 years of pirate action. Along with dozens of their fictional counterparts, these legendary fellows are readying their old sea legs for the game's release this fall.