That's what the "Message from GOG.com" on my shelf says, too (Valid until Feb 12th 2016 11:00 GMT). But when trying to redeem it says Expire Feb 12, 2026.

That might be it. Good point.

Or what about buses? I never understood why a banana republic did not have any bus systems in the previous Tropico games.

I redeemed the code and the price in my basket dropped from £24.99 to about £8.49. I went to add another game to my cart. Now I've gone back to the cart and the price is back to £24.99. I went to redeem the code again and naturally it says the code has already been used. Did I really only have one chance to use it and I blew it because I wanted to spend more money? :-)

Pretty harsh fair price package on this one, gulp.

In any case, owning the third one is quite sufficient as they don't add much from one episode to the other.

Seems like it. You'd better contact support.
Oh well...

I know that Tropico is a warm and sunny island, but doesn't El Presidente care about penguins at all?
#Linux!

Yeah the same things has happened to me - see my post a couple above yours...

Wow! It's a miracle! I ended up winning Tropico 4 on Steam from someone/somewhere a while back and I hesitated to get a copy of Tropico 5 hoping it would some day make it to GOG, and simultaneously managed to lose every giveaway/raffle for it on Steam to date fortunately, so now I can add it to my wishlist here to grab in the future for sure!

To be honest I never thought we'd see it here but it's good to see it finally show up.

Already did but choose website glitcher instead. My ticket number: 23E1YFHK

Yes, the same happened to me. In GOG's logic a code is already used, even if you didn't use it to buy something with it, because you had the glorious idea of buying more games in a single row. In my humble opinion this should be fixed.

I realize that my response probably isn't likely to change anyone's mind who have firmly made up their mind about Galaxy on topics like this, but I'll share it anyway if for no other reason than to put an alternative reasonable perspective out there.

Massive mega wall of text begins here (or is it a giga or tera wall of text... I forget):

Lets consider for the sake of argument that for a given game that exists, we have the following options for bringing it to the GOG store, and these options only, because they're the only ones that are on the table between the publisher/developer's will and GOG's:

For starters, we will ignore any LAN or Direct IP multiplayer support that may or may not exist because those are completely separate options and this particular issue is completely all about online matchmaking services. A game publisher may or may not wish to provide LAN or Direct IP support and that's their choice and is orthagonal to the purpose of multiplayer matchmaking.

These are the options we had before Galaxy existed with an optional multiplayer matchmaking service provided by GOG that will exist as long as GOG exists:

Option 1:
1) The game has multiplayer matchmaking support provided by the game publisher/developer themselves. This probably requires creating an account on the company's 3rd party service and may or may not require having a license key to uniquely identify to their server as a legitimate owner of the product. The multiplayer service may be terminated at any time the publisher/developer decides to for whatever reasons they decide to do it, including if the company goes out of business or just considers the game's multiplayer to be an ongoing expense that is no longer justified because it doesn't bring in enough revenue to pay for itself anymore or to be worthwhile to their bottom line. The game no longer has multiplayer matchmaking any more if this happens, and owners of the game are left only able to play the game single-player or using LAN or DirectIP multiplayer modes if the game has support for that which many games do not, and that is more and more common as time passes, which means there probably wont be any multiplayer at all.

2) Same as #1 only it uses a 3rd party service like GameSpy. If that 3rd party service goes out of business or otherwise terminates support for the game, the consequences are identical to #1 above.

3) The game is available on Steam and uses Steamworks for its multiplayer matchmaking as the only option. I am not aware of any GOG games for sale right now that provide multiplayer support which requires the user to use Steam. If I am correct on this, then either the game will be provided to GOG without any multiplayer matchmaking support at all, or the game may not be offered to GOG in the first place, or GOG may reject it depending on various criterion that may vary in their decisions from one game to another depending on how well they think the game will sell without this feature being present. The Full Spectrum Warriors game series available here is a great example of this. The original game on DVD has LAN and online multiplayer. The Steam version has online multiplayer, not sure about LAN multiplayer. The GOG version is single-player only. Some game companies may be ok with selling their games single-player only on GOG while others may not be. Likewise, GOG may or may not be ok with it on a game by game basis.

In either case above, the customer or potential customer is either completely screwed with respect to multiplayer right from the get go, or has to use a 3rd party service that is outside of GOG's control and which could end at any instant in time. This is the least attractive option for people who want to play online multiplayer using a matchmaking service.

Now GOG provides their own matchmaking service to publishers as another potential option they can use to provide multiplayer services, and GOG users have the option as to whether or not they want that feature and want to use the service. Nobody is forced to use it.

Here is the situation with GOG Galaxy multiplayer:
- The game supports multiplayer matchmaking through a GOG ran service, so no additional license key is needed to activate the game.
- No 3rd party user accounts are necessary to play the multiplayer game.
- The game does not rely upon the publisher or any other 3rd party service to keep multiplayer servers online and running now or any time in the future.
- As long as GOG.com exists as a business and keeps the service up and running, the multiplayer support essentially lasts forever, or for as long as it is possible to keep it running. While this can only be speculative, it is pretty reasonable to expect it to keep running as long as the game is still sold in the store so that people who own it can still play it even if the game gets removed for sale in the future or the game company becomes insolvent or whatever, so long as no legal contract bars that from happening.

Between the options of using a 3rd party multiplayer matchmaking service and one ran by GOG themselves which is much more friendly than just about any 3rd party services and also can provide support for multiplayer across different distribution platforms using crossplay, the GOG Galaxy multiplayer solution is arguably superior than any other solution that exists in any other game for sale here right now, many of which have had their multiplayer services terminated when Gamespy or similar services shut down, and some games of which the entire game got pulled from the GOG catalogue and is no longer available for sale here due to Gamespy going down (ArmA games for example).

So between the options of:
1) Having a game with no multiplayer at all.
2) Having a game with multiplayer that requires a Gamespy like service or the publisher's servers.
3) GOG providing a much more friendly service themselves that they control and which should last as long as GOG exists as a company and is legally able to provide the server support and willing to pay to keep them online.

... the GOG solution of Galaxy Multiplayer is arguably the better of the choices available.

Now I know that various people will say "there are other options" and suggest "make it mandatory that all games have LAN support or DirectIP support" or similar suggestions. Those suggestions are of course all desireable to all of us, I mean why would any of us NOT want those options really. But the fact is that a game company may not provide those options and may be completely unwilling to provide them for business reasons, for the engineering manpower it would take to implement them, or for any other reason that they are free to choose to not do it because it is their game.


<span class="bold">&lt;continued below&gt;</span>

<span class="bold">&lt;continued from above&gt;</span>
So just because it is technically possible for such options to be coded up and included in the games does not mean that a company is remotely willing to do it. If a company is willing to do it, then this particular topic is not so relevant for that one game. This topic is only really relevant for games that do not and will not provide it regardless of the reasons why. If the game company's only prerogative is that they will provide multiplayer _only_ by using their own servers, or by using a 3rd party service, or if they are willing to consider using GOG's service, and those are the _only_ options they're remotely willing to consider to sell their game here other than perhaps ripping out multiplayer altogether and selling it single-player only, then those will be the options on the table for GOG to choose whether or not to sell the game, and the only options available to GOG customers to play the game regardless of whether there are technically other ways that it theoretically could be done that the game company wont consider doing (whether it is for perfectly reasonable sound reasons, or because they are evil money grubbing bastards <grin>).

So, given a specific limited number of choices that us gamers in the peanut gallery are not able to control or add our own desired solutions to, if we have to pick from those specific options - having servers that GOG controls and can keep running is IMHO a vastly superior solution than having to rely on 3rd party services that prove over time and time again to be unreliable, or the publishers themselves that have shown time and time again to be happy to disconnect multiplayer when it becomes an expense to them and their profits are lagging due to some kind of economic struggles.

Aside from all of that though, between the choices of not having a game here at all, having the game here without multiplayer, or having it with GOG galaxy multiplayer - having it here allows the customer to be the one to decide whether to buy it or not and each customer can make that decision for themselves and have what they want and choose whether or not to support GOG and/or the publisher of that game. WIthout the game here, the option is removed and decided by others for business purposes. If the game is here and does have GOG multiplayer and someone would have bought it for single-player only, they can simply buy it and never use multiplayer and they're no worse off than if it didn't have multiplayer - they're not forced to use the optional multiplayer.

Yes, that is the wall of text version. The TL;DR version is that GOG galaxy multiplayer adds something valuable to the ballgame without taking anything at all away, and the fact it even exists will mean that at least some number of games will become available here that either wouldn't have ever come to the store at all before, or that would have come here neutered with no multiplayer. If people are angered by Galaxy multiplayer for any reason, they simply can choose to not buy the games that support it and they're no worse off than if the games didn't exist. While they're busy not buying those games, others who don't have such strongly polarized viewpoints about the issue like me and probably the overwhelming majority of gamers out there (to be honest) will now have an option to buy that game DRM-free in our favourite store and actually have a functional multiplayer for it that doesn't rely on 3rd party servers or need license keys to activate etc.

Everyone wins, even including the people who don't see it that way because they are not actually losing anything at all, and they're free to not buy these games and pretend they don't even exist in the catalogue.

People are completely free to respecfully disagree or have alternative opinions in any way they see fit and I completely respect that. I only ask folks to carefully consider the needs and desires of the entire community and not just themselves, and that if a feature is available that some people want to have and others are opposed to, they're not forced to use it, but if the option is not available then nobody can use it, and that may also mean the game itself is not available even for single player use, and while some might be fine with that, many others will be affected negatively.

Galaxy multiplayer only adds an option, it takes nothing away from anyone. It's not having Galaxy multiplayer available as an option that would take something away from everyone.