Top-down vs Isometric and Z-Levels vs No Z-Levels

[kaos78414]

Firstly, HEY GUYS! I've missed you. And happy holidays!

It's been awhile, but recently I've been working on a game. For now, I'll just say that it's inspired by several different Roguelikes, as well as games like Dwarf Fortress, Gnomoria, Towns, etc. That said, I'm facing a very important design decision that I have to make before I move forward.

The first issue is that of perspective. Top-down vs. Isometric:
This is mostly an aesthetic issue, but I'd still like you guys' opinion on it.

Z-levels:
From a development standpoint, having no z-levels provides a number of advantages. One is that I only have to worry about X and Y, so there's that of course, and it's a big advantage in terms of development speed. Another good point is that Z-levels can be difficult to deal with from a usability standpoint when you're in a 2D environment. Another advantage still is that I'll be using less computer resources, and thus will be able to do things like having a larger amount of entities on screen at a given time and things of that nature

That said, without Z-levels there is a bit of a loss of interaction. My original plan was to alleviate some of this by allowing players to "discover" areas through various means, and then players could access those areas from a GUI. This would give the impression that the world is bigger, while keeping all the advantages of not having z-levels. (so for instance, if the player builds a watch tower, clicking on it might show the top of the watchtower where your archers or cannoneers or what have you are stationed, or maybe a mining elevator allows the player to "discover" underground caverns, etc etc)

There is also the problem of aesthetics. How to deal with certain things. For instance, how to display roofs? Waterfalls? And for players who enjoy building spectacular castles spanning multiple floors, not having Z-levels may be a disappointment. What is your opinion on this problem?

I'll leave you guys with a few very early screenshots of the simplex noise-based terrain generator:
http://i.imgur.com/i41sK.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/EZVCR.jpg
The darker areas and water are lower on the heightmap, and the lighter areas and stone are higher.

EDIT: Some development history on this thing -
I'm using C# and the XNA framework for this. At first, my initial thought was to go with what I know - PHP, CodeIgniter, JS, maybe a websockets implementation. And in fact, that's what I did to start with. More and more, it was becoming glaringly obvious that I was putting unnecessary layers between the player and the game (there was no need to have a client-server communication, it's a single player game!) So eventually I switched to C#, and it's going great so far!

[Jackolantern]

Isometric is definitely more popular these days, but yes it is more complicated. The coding is more complicated, the asset generation is more complicated, and so on. But almost all of these types of games that are not in full 3D these days are isometric since I do have to say they really look better.

The added calculations of isometric will not be noticeable at all in C#. XNA can handle pretty complex 3D graphics with a GPU present, so faux-3D with isometric won't be able to slow it down on a reasonable computer unless it is handling thousands of entities at once. So that really doesn't need to be a consideration they way it would be if you were going HTML5. .NET could run an isometric game, a server, compress a video and do your taxes all at the same time

[Callan S.]

I think get opinions from people who will actually play you game (ie, people who want to be playtesters), about isometric vs top down.

It doesn't really matter what's 'popular' these days - you're better off trying to appeal to people who want to put in some effort to your game, than basing your considerable coding efforts on a guess on what people you don't know and have never spoken to find popular. That stuff is for companies who throw millions at programmers.

Also you could have still 3D views people can generate, to see the castle they build or whatever. Don't need to play in 3D, just the capacity to take the 2d map data and make a 3d image.