Here's an example of what you can do with a single tree style as long as you make them different sizes. And this is only a very rough version of the map (not even alpha quality).

I hadn't thought of the scaling for a different look, I do rotate them though.

Still not enough variation of foliage...look at individual bushes, what are there...2?

If you want brown bushes, there are (3). One is boulder shaped and makes a good oval / round bush. Another is radial style where all of the branches come from a central point. The last is treelike with vertical branches.

A lot of the brown bushes were reskinned for winter maps.

Another link where mappers discuss gamestate:
http://www.iwnation.com/Forums/index.php?showtopic=17990

Slyk recommends targeting 24000 as maximum when developing the map. I'm not sure if that's 24000 in BAS with only one player connected or 24000 in DM/TDM with only one player connected.

I did a small test tonight.

Tuchola Forest 040 has 1316 misc_model entities and TDM with a single player is around 21147 bytes.

After removing 859 trees (all of my winter pine tree models), gamestate dropped to 21099 bytes.

So... additional copies of the same misc_model barely seem to affect gamestate at all. Or at least not in a very measurable manner.

Which is great news. That means the only thing to worry about in my South Forest area is framerate / tri counts. Since I'm targeting 30k-50k tri counts at a fog distance of 15,000u, when I switch to 8000u max fog range I'll be right in the zone for performance.

WuphonsReach writes...

Anyone have an idea on what the target values for gamestate should be for a single person connected to the map in the various modes?

I'm at 25k on my test server for a single-player connected in BAS mode.

Did some testing with a fairly clean test server (only a few PK3s, no special mods).

Barbarossa weighs in at 26300 in Base Assault with a single player connected. For CNQ, it's around 24150. In TDM mode, it's approximately 23100.

Smolensk is around 25575 in Base Assault, 23650 in CNQ and 20900 in TDM.

So if my map stays at around 25000 in Base Assault mode, I should be good to go.