OK posting this is killing me, it keeps blowing up. I am going to do it para by para to see what is wrong.

Edit: I found it! sorry for all the spam. I posted the problem in the feedback forum.

Hi MNDV! I am not after your commission, but I have some experience with this. First your screen shot is nice and I don't know what you dislike about it! As someone who did this a very long time ago here is my opinion.

I think terrain is hard in this sort of game for a bunch of reasons. The first is that the texels on the terrain always look big compared to the hard edges of the polys of the objects on it, meaning it looks blurry. You can soften the edges of objects with blobby shadows to try and reduce the contrast. Depth of field wasn't a thing when I did this, but maybe you could try that on the tanks.

Then, you want a multiple layer approach to the terrain. Ideally your texture won't have baked in lighting, and you'll use a mesh and light the terrain. You want lots of little flashes to bring out the shape, so every time something blows up it will have a brief light that will light that patch of ground. That brings variety.

Then things like trees and hedges should be layered sprites. Draw a bunch of blobby green billboards at different heights for a sort of fur effect. Trees can have these angled, too, away from the central trunk. You can weave tanks under them. Obviously lighting this is harder. You will need to cheat.

Water is tough. Sea, I have never done but is -- I think -- an animated mesh. Look at google earth to see what sea looks like from above. Rivers should be static. But you want them to sparkle somehow, so that's another layer.

Buildings need to be meshes. A city scape is much tougher than the other terrains you want to build because it is so much more complex. Consider not doing it -- what about a road with gas stations and drive thrus? That will be easier. If you can, get windows to reflect light too.

Lastly I have a 'ten seconds of fun' rule. I try and imagine how much fun a feature will have versus the cost. For something like terrain which is fundamentally not part of the game and will probably be mostly ignored, you need to think very carefully because the cost is high for those ten seconds. I think the thing you should do is make the terrain interactive, because that's where the fun is. Leave scars on the ground where you miss and stuff explodes. Have trees burn, petrol tankers explode, birds fly away, maybe even a herd of sheep bolt across the field. All these will distract from the terrain itself, and you won't need to worry so much about a blurry texture.

I dunno, just my 5c. :)

Hey! No worries, glad I at least reinforced your current path. Treating trees from above as fur and plains is not my idea fwiw: I knicked it from a game I played!

Also that screenie is gorgeous, looking forward to some videos