Hex grids were never ment to look good but instead they simplify some game mechanics like pathfinding (distance betwen two neighbouring tiles is always the same), range checking, etc.
With hex grids you easily gets depth perception by simply rendering hex grid on 3D plane.

But as it was already pointed out hex grids have their drawbacks:
Without specialy designed autotiles like in Civilization 5 you will have problems of making any straight edges. There will always be thet hexagonial look. Even thou i have seen a game that used hex grids and looked quite well. But that game used a bunch of verry small hexagons so they were barely noticable.
The second and probably the bigest problem is that by using hex maps you can forget about any height representations as they wil look ugly. Check "Missionforce Cyberstorm" for example.

So as User137 I would also suggest to you to use triangles based map design itself or to be more specific same design that was used for Settlers. You can read a bit about this design here: http://widelands.svn.sourceforge.net...ry/index.xhtml