Hi everyone, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.
 
I'm leading a small team working on a currently unannounced strategy game in the vein of the classic X-Com games. One of areas giving me the biggest headache is the isometric tile art, which seems to be done pretty much exclusively by pixel artists nowadays (as opposed to 3D graphics from an isometric view) so I thought you guys would be the best people to talk to about it.
 
I'm trying to work out how suitable isometric (pixel) art could be for my game. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the original X-Com, it came out about 15 years ago and looks like this : http://www.xcomhaven.com/images/ufo3.gif (apologies for the low quality image)
 
Unsurprisingly, we're looking for something a bit more up-to-date than this, but. Normal pixel art would not be well suited to what I'm looking for, as it's full of bright colours and is heavily stylised rather than realistic. However, terrain art such as is used in Laser Squad Nemesis (eg here and here) is more what we're looking for. Do you guys know anything about it? I take it that style of iso tile is painted rather than drawn pixel style? Is it difficult to do? Would an experienced pixel artist easily be able to convert their style to produce that kind of terrain, or are they very different in practice?
 
I know it's not necessarily your area of expertise, but it's very difficult to find information about isometric art as nowadays everything is just modelled up in 3d and displayed isometrically by the game engine (and that's not really an option for us as we're using a 2D engine). Any info that you guys can provide would be appreciated.