Those may not be grain fields, it could be the herb garden for the alchemist/wizard/healer, too.

Looks very nice, thanks.

Im soo pumped!  I can't stop staring at it!!

And I will second this But they did it in MoM and CIV so I think we can expect it Though wouldnt be awesome to see a 20,000 people settlement take up like 10 map spaces and 20,000 visible little houses we could count!? lol right...

and whats in the cave do you think? Looks like a monster cave to me! lol

Frogboy said that he wants to be able to keep zooming in until you can see the "leaves on a tree" so maybe you might be able to see all the little people in a crowd.   that being said, I think you will either need some changes of perpesctive or something for it to work. 

Demigod does this wierd wide-lens effect (I think that is what it is, I'm not a camera person) when you zoom all the way out.  It changes the scope a little, or makes it seem that way.  I bring it up just because it is a strang camura effect I imagine could be used for the transition between levels of detail and scale of objects.

 

Since cities will spread on the map (each size increase gives you another tile to spread your city towards, ie. no one-tile cities like civIV, but multiple tile cities) I think we'll get a good representation of city sizes on the map.

Thats beatiful, very rich in details like each piece of the house roofs and cleary see the fence shape even from afar. I really liked this one a lot. I wonder how would that look in closer view.

I like how they are, but aren't the trees to big? The pines are much taller than the walls and even taller than the multi-floor buildings. I think they would give more dimension being smaller, they make that place look like a very small village (or more than it is). Anyway, maybe there trees grow bigger.

Nice use of colors and light too. I like the attention in looking for a small touch of a more vivid color to the enviroment, like with the blue building. The effects for grass illusion looks great that way.

I like the graphic style too.  Its fresh and clean and leaves a lot to the imagination.  One quibble-I hope the roads to not retain that look.  I too thought they were power lines.  Now that I know they are fences, all I can think of is why?  To keep deer off the road?  To keep the elite troop of blind death knights from attaching the fields?  To keep the beer wagons from going into the ditch?

ok enough

The fences are to give your politicians a place to sit.

ZING!

lol, I didn't grasped that fences on the road too just the ones inside the village. At first it looked to me as some old kind of railroad even tough there isn't going to be a train and it goes strait to the door, because I couldn't understand it.

Looks like there is a chest to northweast, a cyclop's house in the north and crystals to south; but just above the crystals, a pointy thing I didn't got too. And later on I noticed there is one person in the town, very nicely done in size.

That's a very interesting direction!

Sorry, couldn't resist...

I'm with pretty much everyone on this. You could leave this art alone, it looks great! Looks so clean, and easy on the eyes.

Maybe they're very small walls...  If you think about it, historically many city walls were between 10-40' high (a few were higher).  There's quite a few trees taller than that, especially in older forests.  It's one reason people put cities and especially fortresses on high ground, and why you add towers: it lets you see threats further out.

 

I'd guess the walls were about 3-4 meters tallk, which I think is about 18'-20' tall (I can't judge imperial measurements).  If you look at the doors to the buildings, and guess that is about 2 meters tall, and the wall is about twice that high, so 3-4 meters tall.

Question! Question! Oh, oh, me, me! Question!

Do we need to put walls around our cities? I've always preferred my cities wall-less, except maybe the inner courtyards or a keep. Or is it a 'building' like any other? The cities in my heartlands rarely have walls unless absolutely necessary.

And no, anyone that's thinking about ever meeting me in a multiplayer match didn't just hear that.

You didn't "put" cities anywhere. You either built a wall around a city that already existed, in which case you won't be seeing it on any bloody hills - or you built a keep or castle, and then had a city grow up around it. Very rarely in history was a city constructed with any real idea about it, at large. The idea to plan out a city beforehand is a relatively new invention.

With the obvious exception of very specific temple cities and such. But those aren't 'real' cities.

And no matter what, wheter those walls came to be around a castle on a hilltop or a city that grew in the middle of a bloody forest, you cleared all trees around it. For obvious reasons. So the height of trees then or now is irrelevant.

But yes, those pinelooking trees are bloody enormous.

I think this sounds absurd, but according to wikipedia, pines grow to between 3-80m. Yes. It actually says 80m. I first thought it was a typo for 8, but then it says that the average height of most species of pine is 15-45m. So yes.

Pines are huge.

Edit: They also live for a thousand years. Bastards.

"This tree is the largest species of pine, commonly growing to 40-60 meters (130-200 feet) tall, exceptionally up to 81 m (265 ft) tall, and with a trunk diameter of 1.5-2.5 m (5-8 ft), exceptionally 3.5 m (11 ft)." Sugar Pine - Wikipedia

And thats just pine trees. Redwoods grow up to 115.5 meters according to wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)

Yep, trees are big when you don't cut them all down like we here in the USA did.

However, I would not expect trees to be much bigger than they are in the screenshot, since they have had a relatively short time to grow since that area was made habitable by a channeler... IMO they are just the right size. Big enough to give a decent sense of scale, small enough to not get in the way of looking at the map.