just going to say again that i never suggested 2d anything. basically i think realistic unit textures might not give back improvements in all departments. youll notice the aoe2 units were actually textured really simply, lots of untextured, matte materials which were just given detail by the shading of the geometry they were applied to. this aint doable in real time of course, you cant make the units THAT high poly. but yeah the only textures really on the human aoe2 units were shield/drape decals and the occasional wood texture. once again i dont know if this was an intentional design decision but i think it worked out because it meant the internal shapes of each sprite were solid, definite blocks of colour, instead of noisy piles of photo details and gradients. i think in cases like this details are ultimately only good for eye candy close ups. the problem is that distance destroys detail in 3d rendering. even with really high anisotropic filtering it seems like the problem arises again when you start wrapping textures around the edges of things, and the textures have to transition to representations of the same texture at a more oblique angle. and on skinned meshes this has to happen constantly, changing every frame as the polygons shift. and when you are zoomed out enough to see the field of battle there's probably not really enough room in onscreen pixels to do a proper transition. the actual solution for saving photorealistic texture detail at a distance might be like, idk, full screen anti-aliasing or something. but hahahah that's kind of an insane goal for even modern hardware. that said i think photorealistic textures are still doable but i think theres gotta be some deliberate visual 'hinting' involved, where the textures are designed first as blocks of color for distance readability, and then the details are laid over--kinda low contrast though so they don't obscure the forms or muddy the textures too much at a distance. maybe this sounds stupid but it isnt that dumb when you consider how valve planned all the unit designs for tf2 to be as readable and clear as possible. btw i'm NOT saying change the environment textures. the environment textures are just fine. basically if the human units are made to be a little simpler in contrast with the dense and realistic environment textures. they'll like be units of negative space in a densely detailed positive space world, which will make them automatically pop out, to the viewer. itll be an advantage to have the world textures remain high-detail, tbh. so moving back to the 'higher poly for a clear, self-contained silhouette' idea. i heard someone mention somewhere in an interview that you guys were considering deferred lighting which i think would probably make lighting a tonne of higher poly units easier cause the amount of pixels that need actual lighting will never change. that said poly fill might still be kind of a bottleneck, but have you guys looked into instanced skinning? you might end up needing something like that anyway, if you ever gun for higher screen resolutions, higher unit counts, or more special effects. and itd definitely let you add like ~250 extra polys per unit. now i guess you guys are using glsl instead of directx which might give you some problems because glsl doesnt seem to totally have a clear way to do some of the things directx does—but idk maybe it does and i just didnt read carefully enough? idk these are just ideas. good luck with your project whatever happens. its a cool goal and i hope you make it.