I would like to see normal maps in glest, as graphic engines can handle it for like 10 years, but glest cannot. Normal maps have the advantage of more biautiful lightning, and in future, you could enable hardware tesselation (which is a modern function of graphic engines)
THe difference would be like this:
http://img159.imageshack.us/i/720compare0uw9.jpg/Only thing that this is another game, but it shows the message.
It woudnt really matter for the devellopment time, because there is a simple normal maps plugin for gimp, which creates a normal map from sa texture
