texturing terrain for games
 

I'm a little unclear as to how the texturing of terrain for a game goes. I noticed in Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for the Gamecube that they would have a big portion of land with the regular grass texture, but would have a little spot in the middle somewhere of a dirt texture. I figure they either made the geometry for the ground more or less a grid of square faces all across it to be able to map the uv's easily or they just divided the ground up into sections and carefully mapped each giant face to a texture and repeated the texture in the file node.

Maybe I'm completely off on this... I dunno really. It seems like it would be easier to make a big grid of square faces, but that obviously would increase the poly count a lot.

Any thoughts?