Okay so multi texturing no big deal but is there like texturing where i can apply 3-4 or more textures on a polly without having to render the poly again? I understand Cg could do this.. Because i have terrain and this terrain needs 2 be faded between 3 terrain types Mud,Grass,Rocky and then also they need a LightMap applied to them... Can this be done without slow code.. The Polly target is 130000 pollies just for the terrain and so this will be about 70% of the load and so 160 000 pollies will be rendered total.. Can this be achieved on some of the latest machines???? (Game Mechanics Frames are relatively low since its for a tile based RTS)

You could use Cg (I actually recommend OGL SL) but to get the preformance you want, it shouldnt be necessary. Several passes should be fine. Heres how:

Because this is an RTS you shouldnt ever need to draw all of the terrain at once. Culling the frustrum is very easy with RTS games; dont let GL do it. In fact, a quad tree would probably suit your needs well. If you need to do perspectives on the terrain, there is an effective culling method described in Game Programming Gems 4 called Terrain Occlusion Culling with Horizons.

Also, unless your RTS has caves, you want to turn off the depth test when rendering the terrain; just make sure to draw things in the right order. Also, dont bother clearning the frame buffer; drawing the terrain over everything should do that for you.

Well, I actually think you can apply 4 textures per pass using standard multitexturing. I guess minimal requirement is NV20 however, NV1x only allows 2 textures as far as I can remember.

Most vendors are not interested in pushing the old multitexturing paradigm anymore so don't expect to see more than 4 multi texture units, even if the video card can do it.

But why bother with standard multitexturing in the first place? It takes more time to integrate and the results are less interesting. You shall really look to GLSL or Cg, unless you want to target obsolete hardware.