Thanks for the comments.

Probably took me 4 hours from start to finish. The render was 33% larger and I shrunk it in Pshop for this forum.

Frankly, I prefer David's image much more. But, of course taste is subjective. Artur and I have discussed this previously ;-)

I started out with the atmosphere, ground plane and the mountains. It's much easier to control the sky color using standard atmosphere. Once that was done, I added the terrain 'launch pad' then added the rivers and road planes.

The foreground buildings is a single bitmap driven terrain with a primitive based ecosystem on top of it. I added some lighting textures as well as some refelective maps to spice it up a bit.

I'd prefer a better foreground and I also like David's color scheme better. I ended up using a couple point lights to 'brighten' up the middle ground.