About the style: Awesome. I'm a huge AoEII fan (with the Conquerors expansion). Between me, my Dad, my two brothers and a couple of friends of ours we used to have regular 3-on-3 battles until recently when we lost the CD. That's why I'm making an RTS But yeah, I think of that time when there were a decent amount of games made like that was great. Stronghold was very good-looking, and those 2.5D games or even completely 2D games looked way better than the full-3D games of that time.

About the framerate: I guess the framerate drop isn't the amount of 3D entities, but the amount of vertices being animated on the CPU. jcl expressed willingness to add a flag that allows for animation on the GPU, and hopefully that comes out soon.

Of course, we generally aren't meant to develop with updates in mind since updates are uncertain.

The style you describe would be awesome Some really cool effects could be done, I reckon.

Jibb