If you made the water have a layer of reflection using blurred cube map i think it would be breathtaking.
I've experimented with cube maps but they don't seem to work well with this game. I think the scale is all wrong, they work well on a big lake reflecting mountains but for a game like this you'd expect the reflections to match up with the scenery. Also I'd need to increase the polycount of the water a lot to create the sort of 'noise' needed to distort the cube map.
I like the rest of the graphics too, but not as much as everyone else praises them. I've seen as good in blitz.
Fair enough. Bear in mind these are functional, tile based graphics. The entire landscape is generated from a very small dataset (the biggest maps are currently less than 2K when compressed into a turn file). Far prettier results could be produced with arbitrary modelling but it wouldn't really be practical for this game. And I wouldn't be able to include a fully functional level editor.