--- A Collection of Lifelike Isles from the Far Reaches of this World's Oceans ---

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The maps in this collection make use of Tropico 5's quite beautiful graphics interface to create LIFELIKE islands, each featuring:
- a challenging topography (w/ most elevations accessible by road)  
- true to life landscapes and vegetation (shaped by the elements: water, sun, prevailing winds)  
- realistic placement of mineral resources and the associated type of mining  
- an abundance of well spaced ocean resources, with the added features of the Waterborne expansion in mind  

Each map in this collection will provide hours of playtime simply in the exploration of its terrain, and possibly days to fully open up all corners of its wilderness to development. This is achieved by dialing up the difficulty in some aspects of gameplay, to try to mirror real life constraints and complications. For example:

- GOOD NATURAL ANCHORAGES ARE RARE IN REAL LIFE. With few exceptions, all major cities on coasts have grown around a historic port, which was chosen by early settlers for the protected anchorage it provided to their ships, seaside homes and harbor facilities. The reason these cities later developed was that there were few such spots, so trade and immigration had to run through them. So it should be on a Tropico 5 map, too. It is unrealistic to be able to place docks everywhere (and it would make shorelines look rather bland). So on the maps in this collection, you can't. Just as early settlers had to in real life, you may need to expend considerable effort to find that protected anchorage that can be expanded into a deep sea port.

- ACCESSING THE HINTERLAND IS NEVER EASY. Road building in real life is often an engineering feat. Establishing a coastal foothold is easy; it often then took decades if not centuries to blaze a trail into the heartland. If you zoom in on Google Maps anywhere in South America, you'll see that in many areas not even today, in the 21st Century, road networks extend far beyond the coastal plains. And even sophisticated societies grappled with road building: read up on the history of California State Route 1 to realize how much trial and error, dead ends, curves and blasting it required to build that highway. And a straight line it is not! So it won't be on any of the maps in this collection, either. Be prepared to commit serious engineering resources (= your time) to the charting of your roadways!

- PRIME REAL ESTATE IS VALUABLE. The world isn't flat. There are inclines, downslopes, flood plains, bogs, and sandy or shift grounds unsuited as foundation for any building. Even the best structural engineer can only turn so much of any landscape into buildable land. Scarcity of good real estate is especially pronounced on an island, where many potential uses compete for the little available land. You wonder why your little nation initially comes out seemingly a bit disjointed, or - gulp - some might even say, ugly? So it does in real life, with depressing frequency. Development spoils the natural beauty, often beyond repair: witness some of the coastlines of the Caribbean, or the concrete entombment of the once beautiful eastern Adriatic shores. These maps are a good crash course on how hard it truly is to retain the beauty of an island paradise while accomodating population growth, tourism and industrialization. It takes a developer with great foresight and aestetic vision to take the beauty of these maps and turn them into equally beautiful island nations. Some trial and error may be in order. So don't believe you will be able to make do without sacrifices, either. That old charming colonial town near the water? Well, it served its purpose, and your island nation does need an international airport now, doesn't it? And that beautiful Victorian-era church on Harbor Lane? It's congregation won't like it, but some campaign contributions, environmental impact reports and a threat to move your operations abroad will see it become a big, hulking sports stadium in due time. Probably paid for by the islands' taxpayers. Suckers.

- NATURAL RESOURCES MUST BE EXPLORED. One of my biggest bug bears in Kalypsos' vanilla maps was that you could always immediately see where natural resources were located. How is that realistic? The budgets for exploration and resource development of any real life mining/oil concern will show you how hard it is to locate deposits/oil fields. Historically, much mining development was triggered by nothing but chance discovery of deposits, when a trapper stumbled upon gold flakes in a river stream. Similarily, don't expect natural resources on any of the maps in this collection to reveal themselves easily. You'll have to really explore and investigate each island to make such discoveries, and even if you do, deposits/oil fields may be in difficult-to-access locations that will stymie your efforts for some time to build out the necessary infrastructure to exploit them.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR PERSONAL PLAYSTYLE: If you are just starting out with Tropico 5, these maps might be a bit much to handle right off the bat. Similarly, if you like to just build flat, cookie-cutter megalopolises, these maps are a terrible choice to accomplish that. And if you dislike challenges, have little patience, or seek easy gratification, I very strongly suggest you stay clear of this collection and instead dial up a Sandbox play using randomly generated Sandbox maps (which give you a continous landmass and flat terrain). Please don't rate the maps in this collection down just because they don't fit well with your personal playstyle.

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For those amongst us who these maps were made for: have much fun playing them! And please do rate them up to allow others to find them, too.