On opening the editor, the first thing I noticed was the resolution. Unlike in EE, the editor in EE2 is displayed in the resolution you are currently playing in, in my case this was 1280x1024, which provides for a nice workspace. The shots here are all in 1024x768 to try and keep the image size down on the full screen shots.
The opening screen looks like this;
Simple, straightforward menus make the whole thing easy and intuitive to navigate; Terrain editing is all very easy and immediately I found a feature I love. It is the AoEH | EEH | RoNH | IndividualsCAN
From here you can change all aspects of the map or ditch it and generate a new one. The choices so far are Temperate, Arid and Tropical for your initial map types. Hopefully the final version will include Arctic and other environments, although of course you can modify the terrain yourself afterwards.
The following shots show how the landscape changes according to the season;
Like EE and some other games you can import elevation data.
More soon.
My Karma ran over my Dogma