I've been thoroughly enjoying this game the last two days. Did a bit of the campaign, which is interesting. I also started a normal game, and started at the Colonial era, on one of the largest islands (I think). I'm now in the modern era, and feel like I've fully explored each era, and now I understand the game well.
During the World Wars era, and into the Cold War era, I was having problems with rebels growing in number and attacking stuff. I was assassinating the leaders when they'd rise up, and when I got a prison in place I was imprisoning a lot of them, but this led to high civil unrest, so from that point on I was careful to balance my actions toward the rebels.
I used the World Wars and Cold War eras to build a strong economy, first resource based, and then I moved into manufacturing, using my own resources. The Island had quite a bit of gold, which was useful once I had the ability to build jewelry workshops. It also had a lot of oil, which was very useful indeed. However, once I had reached the end of the Cold War era, I had all but run out of natural resources on my island. thankfully, I had already built a massive tourism industry and quickly set up good relations with other nations to allow cheap importing of the resources I needed to expand my manufacturing capabilities.
I now have the vast majority of the island covered with a very dense city. I have very good happiness in all areas, a population of over 1600, 95% popular support (goes between 90 and 100%), rebel threat and civil unrest has been at none for the entire modern era, and good relations with every nation. I also have built an economy with a surplus of $3million, despite having enacted a lot of expensive legislation, and bumped the budget of the majority of businesses and other buildings higher than average.
Now this island is self-sufficient, and nothing goes wrong at all, but it just makes me want to start again from nothing, on a completely different type of island. Loving this game
Edit: Kept playing on that save for another hour, and now the city is even more dense, approval is a solid 100%, and happiness is peaking across the board. My budget is also over 6 million in the green, despite me having put pretty much every building on max budget, and enacting every good legislation. Population is well over 2k.
