A wonderful new tileset is depicted in this screenshot, it seems to be a barren, dried out landscape from the looks of the dried up grass and large amounts of dirt - although this could just be the affect of an Autumn (Fall) Season on the tileset. The trees look absolutely wonderful and it's great to see that Blizzard isn't just going to stick to the traditional stubby and bushy trees of previous Warcraft games. The trees are somewhat spaced apart aswell, which begs the question; can your units walk inbetween these trees? Although, I doubt we'll be getting an answer to that question anytime soon. :)

Focusing our attention on the units and buildings we can see two Peasants busily mining gold, two Footmen standing guard on either side of a House and just behind them stands the might Paladin Hero Gavinrad the Dire (there is also an ArchMage hero somewhere on the map, this is known because we can see his portrait up in the top left of the game screen). The Paladin has just had a spell cast on him by the Priest standing in front of him, however it is unknown what the spell is, because down in the interface just to the right of the gauntlet (mouse pointer) is where the spells that are cast on the current unit are supposed to appear, however, Samwise Didier who is responsible for doing these icons has put in a placeholder portrait of himself instead of the spell. :)

The other buildings in this shot are the huge Castle in the centre and over next to the chopped down trees is a Human Garrison (Barracks) in the middle of construction. Also of note is that geometrically correct shadows for the buildings have now been fully implemented into the game, although it is still just round circles for the units, this will probably change.

The last few things of note are that we get our first look at a new Critter unit - a Black Wolf (remember these units don't attack your units, they function similar to sheep in Warcraft II). Down in the Paladin's inventory he holds a Potion of Mana and a Ring of some sort. I would suggest the Ring is a Ring of Strength because the Paladin's damage is increased and so is his Strength (as indicated by the green number over the golden fist icon). There is also some new graphics for either the Paladin's Exorcism spell icon or the Healing spell icon.

-Chib