Advice/Help needed on applying terrain tilesets in fantasy game

Advice/Help needed on applying terrain tilesets in fantasy game

My name is Alen Magdic from Croatia, and i used to make PC games, long time ago, around 1994 when we made 3D engine to render 3D terrain and units, that was bought from us by Interplay who made game Warzone with it. After that we made PC Adventure in space, named "The Ward" which was released 2001. And then i quit gaming industry since we were working 16 hrs a day to meet publisher deadline.

3 months ago i got sick of managerial jobs and corporate bullshit and decided to get back to games, and to make iOS & Android strategy defense game named Warlords RTS: Clash of Thrones. You can see the game at http://simosgames.com

Though as we ran into tiles problem, i hope you could give me advice.

So we internally made some provisional tileset (there is attached screenshot). What i am not happy with is schematics we choose to work with and how it looks applied in the game. I gave this article to my artist http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/106884/Implementing-Auto-tiling-Functionality-in-a-Tile-M
but he anyway made this complcated schematics and said terrain is too complicated and he will make only characters for us :) I would like to have quality as attached image (Wilderness). Do you have suggestions which schematics/approach will give us best results? Also maybe you know some artists who are specialized in making terrain so they also know tricks and who can do this paid job? Screenshot with actual terrain tileset:Alpha 1.6 screenshot We would like it to look better, something like next 2 images, closer to cartoonish look of 2nd picture: