Yeah I know, sound ridiculous at first right? The way I see it is this: With any combination of layer color and blending modes (and possibly opengl shaders) there are so many crazy things you could do with tilemaps that I figured why not? I actually did the math on this though -- each layer between 320 and 1280 tiles rendered * 16 layers = 5,000 - 20,000 tiles. On modern hardware I should be able to push at least 60,000 tiles no problem. Though all the layers don't have to be visible at the same, at least.