I was messing around in Photoshop, and I thought the forum regulars and Devs might get a kick out of my tilt-shift filter efforts (below). I was going to apply a gradient blur in Photoshop, but I discovered Photoshop actually has a Tilt Shift filter. I also touched up the images with some saturation and tone adjustments. This is a technique typically applied to real-life photographs, to make them resemble miniature dioramas. Please view at full size for best effect. My initial inspiration came from thinking about games like Endless Legend, and more recently, Besiege:
Kind of. The general idea is that you take a an actual photograph, and make it look like a teeny tiny model. When we look at very small things, or photograph them, close things are in sharp focus, but focus drops off quite rapidly as they recede into the distance / extreme foreground. That's why aerial photographs of actual real-world locations look like dollhouses, we're simulating the effect of an extremely short depth of field, e.g.:
(I'll say, the problem with applying depth of field fun to CE is that the rendering projection of the game is orthographic so depth doesn't really exist. It's weird.)
Just spitballing here, but it should be possible to apply a spherical warp to an orthographic-perspective screenshot to simulate the way things appear smaller in perspective and then apply tilt-shift wizardry to the result. This will be precisely like applying a square peg into a round hole. I've refined the technique a bit, aligned the focus gradient with respect to the orientation of the game grid, and warped the original screenshot a bit: Here's a picture of real-life Jodhpur for comparison:
