HomeLAN - How will the player manage to create and nurture his pirate crew?Bill Spieth - The answer depends on the strategy the player pursues. One player might decide to obtain more pirates by forcing some of his captives to become new pirates. As you might guess, this produces inferior pirates. But for some strategies in which it doesn?t hurt to lose a crew in battle, this works fine. My own goals require that I push my pirates to higher levels, so I tend to obtain more pirates from ships that I plunder. These guys are always trained sailors and won?t be as likely to die on their first mission.
I nurture my pirates with plenty of high-class food, gambling, wenches and grog. I also send them to school to become more skilled. But a player who is not encouraging his pirates to advance through the levels can spend a lot less effort here. With those strategies, pirates are expendable. Since the low level pirates have fewer demands, in some ways it is easier to keep things running if you have very few of the higher level pirates.
HomeLAN - What sort of activities will your pirate crew be able to do in ?Tropico 2??
Bill Spieth - On the island they visit brothels or courtesans. They go to taverns and smuggler?s dives. Basically, they live to party. At sea, they carry out player orders. Maybe they cruise for plunder, or kidnap a skilled gunsmith, or explore an unknown region of the Caribbean.
HomeLAN - What resources and items will the player have to manage and control in the game?
Bill Spieth - Well, there are a large number of commodities, from parrots to cutlasses, but most of them are optional. Players decide which ones to develop in any particular game.
However, two resources are at the core of your economy: lumber and gold. You get gold by stealing it from other ships, and you get lumber by cutting down trees and sawing them into lumber. You need both to keep your island and your power growing. In particular, lots of gold and lumber are needed to obtain the larger pirate ships.
Tropico 2 is currently being developed by 
