I'd hit it with 3D terrain. Its going to be quite hard being a random tourist exploring, with an old IBM PC with a pimpin 100mhz Pentium 386 that just can't handle 200 vis, only to not see terrain made out of hill objects. With 3D terrain, you can find your builds and other pretty looking areas easily.
Except you have to plan your textures properly and see whats avaliable (you can come to me if you want some extra terrain textures put up) I screwed up most of my sea because the sand i used didn't have a direct transistion to grass, i had to transistion it to Dirt, and then grass. Takes waaay longer.
Edit: Also helps to constantly monitor and save all the terrain to Xelagot's survey memory, so incase demeter screws up, you can 'refresh' the database by deleting all the objects and readding from xelagot's memory. Although doing this constantly is like DDoSing a helpless home computer. Although it should be fine, i only get two disconnects with an Xelagot with a 1000 terrain object dump.
