an update
added some terrain and a rather large bit of water to simulate a river, lake and swampy area
added a number of buildings more ( mostly just copy/rotate/paste ) and a dock area near the bridge ( I hope to have a boat that works )
all buildings have interiors and are laid out to form maze-like paths with multiple ways to get around
large areas of water tends to kill framerate faster than adding geometry
after I finish up the city, I'll begin overloading the map with mapmodels until I 'break' it and fframerate dies off.
btw, my system is a dual opteron workstation with 16gig ddr2 ram
( 4 cores running )