Hey there,
When you folks make your terrain manually, let’s say some hills in the back, are you using regular brushes or are you using simple patch meshes? Same for little bumps in the road that no one can reach cause they’re clipped? What’s eating less FPS?
Thanks for responses
Well brushes are made of less triangles than patch meshes, but it shouldn’t greatly affect FPS.
Patch meshes can be used to make difficult things that a brush can’t or can hardly achieve, like curved roads, bevels, and other geometric stuff 
You might have a look at the following threads:
Problem with Patches
Handy Solution
Those two Threads should be interesting for you to go through. However you can’t decide whether a Brush or a Patch is better just like that.
Since you state that the regarding Patches would be outside the player’s reach, you’re unlikely to face the problems described in the first Thread.
I personally never use Patches for bigger constructions, since they are hard to handle (see Mateos above).
I would always recommend you to use brushes, but that is just a personal preference.
I suggest you create the structure once with brushwork and once with patches. Put them inside one testmap and run it using /r_showtris 2. You’ll see which option suits you better.
Ever tried easygen for terrain? it’s fairly easy to use and give a pretty good result
Yes, I used easygen before but I’s more for a big terrain, not for just window dressing. So for this particular case it needed to be done manually
2Bit for his project Breakout 2 used brushes as surrounding hills (or patches, have to check with r_showtris :P).
Edit: Confirmed, see http://i.imgur.com/boaTHRp.jpg
