Even with L3DT you still have to sit down and do a layout of your world on a piece of paper or in a 2D art program. With Artiki's program you have to learn how find the proper files for import then how to import and massage them in the terrain editor. With the AH terrain editor it's not very complicated. You design the gross land masses in the center 2048x2048 of a 4096x4096 png file in PS or something similar. Then you have to convert it to a 16bit grayscale, the shades of gray starting at sea level = 1000gray to the maximum elevation of 32,000ft = 33000gray. Then convert that to a signed or unsigned RAW format to import into the terrain editor. Then you will have all of your foundational land formations and away you go transforming it into a world that you finish by painting with tree and clutter tiles. As for the TE tools, they are easy enough to learn on the fly, that is how I created my first terrain by seeing what happened when I used a tool.
It really is not complicated, just time consuming even if you do as much 3D construction as possible in L3DT. After 2 years of none stop work and 3 MA terrains, I can tell you, you can go safe with as simple as possible like NDisles or, the complexity I gradually increased by my third terrain riftval. Then there is AH Melee arena game theory as applied to encouraging groups of players to converge as much as possible. That is a schizophrenic impossible proposition since you have three primary game play groups constantly accusing the other two of killing AH3 with their lame play style and mad at you for not creating their idea of utopia. Maybe WO:P will ease some of that tension in the Melee arena since it's what the furball players have tried to describe as their utopia for years. That still leaves the win the war group and GV group who's goals often dove tail better during game play.
About the easiest Hitech could make the TE for hands on use is to create a 3D shape clone tool that you can copy then paste down and rotate the final heading of the cloned object. Otherwise it's just months of tedious busywork you have to be willing to invest. And to be really honest, a month or so of reviewing all the terrains in rotation to understand why things were constructed they way they were. Then time spent with a test terrain testing construction ideas for features. My first terrain BowlMA ended up being a gigantic test terrain, then for the last two I used a small test terrain to see if ideas would work or how to make them work. On BowlMA becasue I ended up using it to learn terrain building the hard way. I routinely built out hundreds of square miles then erased them and started over. By the time I created riftval, I was reviewing the competition's terrains to see how their builders created micro terrain for localized tank combat.
Some have said that's too much effort for a kiddy game, Hitech updated the graphics engine and the terrain tile trees and clutter to a higher standard than AH2. Kind of opened the door to raise the bar for MA terrains considering our competition's terrains in their kiddy games.
