I was hoping that improvements would have been made since Tropico 4-- which I found frustrating due to unintuitive interface and lack of control during gameplay (intentional or otherwise, in any case very different from most other RTSes and sims). Building placement is still fiddly however, roads are impossible to join neatly if you've built orthogonal ones at the wrong lengths, the player has frustratingly little control over production and economy, and even scrolling the map involves reaching your left hand all the way across the keyboard to the arrow keys. Narratively, it has some quirks also: the campaign has the player character declare independence but then next resume as a colonial governor multiple times, the game keeps pushing for the player to play as different successors to the dynasty, and the campaign seems to keep bouncing between two different islands with no narrative justification or difference to the storyline. The campaign relies solely on manual saves and a single autosave, with no mission selector at all.
I got the game as part of a cheap bundle, and that's all I'd recommend paying for it. It's a poor RTS, it doesn't satisfy a city constructor itch, and it's frustrating in that I felt always behind the curve, always in debt-- without even a forecast of expenses and incomes that I was ever aware of.