I love these kind of games and others have mentioned Tropico 6 as a standout in the field.
I've put lots of hours in that game and it's amazingly subtle and complex. There are many, many ways to achieve whatever you want, but also several hard constraints that you have to work around.
If you want to be rich (treasury over $1M, for example), you have let people live in shacks while you build up foreign relations until you can get ridiculous prices for your goods. If you don't have several contracts at 70% over standard price, you can't really get big. You also can't be totally arbitrary in what industries you decide to develop. If you get in good with a country and your island can produce what they will pay (extra) for, you kind of have to do it, regardless of whether it makes your island ugly or puts people in shacks to work there. If you don't give in on the natural resources and foreign demands, you'll never have enough in the treasury to really help people. Kind of a disturbing realism there.
Getting those contracts means you have to give in to foreign demands, like building a $2,000 embassy for China when you'd probably, as a person, think you should buy houses for your workers. Turns out, they'd rather have bread and circuses and a strong economy and you're better off pleasing your betters until you have lots of steady cash flow coming in every month.
And this is just one scenario. There are many ways to play the game that aren't even about the economy. You can run it as a prison island, a military scenario, a spy vs. spy setup, or any combination of these. I think the best thing about Tropico is that, rather than one goal, you as the dictator choose what kind of goals you want and that leads to entirely different kinds of island setups and gameplay.
I've put lots of hours in that game and it's amazingly subtle and complex. There are many, many ways to achieve whatever you want, but also several hard constraints that you have to work around.
If you want to be rich (treasury over $1M, for example), you have let people live in shacks while you build up foreign relations until you can get ridiculous prices for your goods. If you don't have several contracts at 70% over standard price, you can't really get big. You also can't be totally arbitrary in what industries you decide to develop. If you get in good with a country and your island can produce what they will pay (extra) for, you kind of have to do it, regardless of whether it makes your island ugly or puts people in shacks to work there. If you don't give in on the natural resources and foreign demands, you'll never have enough in the treasury to really help people. Kind of a disturbing realism there.
Getting those contracts means you have to give in to foreign demands, like building a $2,000 embassy for China when you'd probably, as a person, think you should buy houses for your workers. Turns out, they'd rather have bread and circuses and a strong economy and you're better off pleasing your betters until you have lots of steady cash flow coming in every month.
And this is just one scenario. There are many ways to play the game that aren't even about the economy. You can run it as a prison island, a military scenario, a spy vs. spy setup, or any combination of these. I think the best thing about Tropico is that, rather than one goal, you as the dictator choose what kind of goals you want and that leads to entirely different kinds of island setups and gameplay.