aGorm: I know what you mean about the old tree images on the volcano. That bothered me too. I'm not near good enough with photoshop (actually gimp) to edit something like that out though. It would have been nice to cover it up with palm trees if we had palm trees. The whole map could have used palm trees.
Concerning the metal on the map, well, I do prefer smaller amounts of metal. You just have to salvage and only work on one big project at a time. When I tested the map I played 2 player so I had about half the metal on the map to work with most of the time. Even then I had to gather wreakage to keep my economy going. One of the nice things about water maps is dead units will always sink so you can always get your metal back. If you are playing a large game, like with over 4 people, I can see how the lack of metal would be a big problem. I guess you just have to play skeeter boat wars for the first half hour
