You could try adding a new polygon of the surface fill texture above the hedges sheet, but below the cliff symbols sheet. You'd have to draw it either exactly along the outside of the hedge symbols to retain the impression and hide the hedge shadows, or draw it quite close to them, so only part of the shadow is still visible, however. The latter might look a bit oddly sharp-edged though.

So alternatively, you might try moving the problematic hedge symbols to a new sheet with a smaller shadow effect, suggesting they're closer to the rising lower hill surface behind the cliff-line.

You could also redraw the cliff line as shorter and lower, so the hedge shadows aren't so obviously problematic.

SS5 Cities of Schley has a selection of Halfling house options (grassy mounds with round doors and windows), and also Elven treehouses, plus rough-looking Orc buildings. The main CD3 Bitmap B style has a larger range of fantasy building options as well, including for Halflings (houses and grassy mounds) and Elven treehouses again, as do the main CD3 vector styles, so there are options there without needing to go down the Annuals route. And the Annuals, being smaller in size than these main products, do tend to concentrate more on providing the basic styles first.

It is worth noting that you can draw your own house shapes using the CD3 toolset, and give the roofs whatever texture you wish from the range of options you have available. Stacking different shapes on top of one another on different Sheets with variant Effects can also increase the options for how things appear. DIY treehouses by placing a suitably-shaped and textured house in different sized tree and other vegetation symbols, all on separate Sheets, for instance. And things like varicolor wooden roofs can be made to work as market stall awnings with a bit of resizing and choice of suitable colours.

Sorry for hijacking your thread, Sue! Can't really add much beyond what's already been suggested above for Darklands Cities II, after all that... 😪

Overland, Cities and Dungeons are the three key planks for CC3+ mapping though, and it has been mentioned here now, so... 😎

@Glitch - Something else you might try is having a second window with another program (such as Windows Explorer) on full screen mode, so it hides the CC3+ window completely. This helps stop the looping as much, and you can check the thumbnail view to see when the CC3+ screen is showing correctly again. I spotted Ralf did exactly this on this week's livestream at one point, so I know it's not just me who finds this helps sometimes!

Go to CC3+, find the drop-down menu "Tools" in the bar along the top of the window, and then go to the "Add Ons" label in that drop-down. That will show you everything you have currently installed, and you can click on any one of those names to access each individual item's description in an HTML file.

Looking good!

I agree on the ground tracks point, particularly for the six and eight-wheelers as they had variations on independent steering per wheel group (and the four-wheelers had independent wheel drives too), so could give much broader overall track spreads.

It might be helpful to have an additional group of aerials to fit to the command vehicles variants (e.g. both the 231 variants, the 232s (6- and 8-rad) and the 222 variant 223), as these are such obvious fixed features in an overhead view, and they have to pass above the turrets, so would need to be drawn that way to allow for the turret pieces to rotate properly.

If you're including the 247, you might want to have the Kfz 13, and the variant Kfz 14 command vehicle - again, it has an overhead aerial, if no turret problem this time!

There are also the SdKfz 221, 260 and 261 (radio car variant of the 260), which you might be able to draw as simply variant top structures/turrets, as being similar to the 222 overall. The 231 (8-rad) headquarters variant, the 263 might be another possibility, along with the 263 (6-rad).

I'll go away now 😎

Stepping things up a little, for all the map is still a reduced-size one, Watery Place two is Bright-Eye Well:

Coming up with a magical well is a bit "shooting fish in a barrel" for RPG scenario-writers, but using details from the original base-map (which was actually for a subterranean barrow tomb) meant I could add some extra interest here, along with making it an open-air feature, a partly natural, partly quarried, hollow in the edge of a hillside. Not quite sure what it is about red and pink rocks that have held a long fascination for me, but I made an early decision that one of the main rock types that was going to keep recurring at Embra was red sandstone. And as luck had it, the second of @Loopysue's excellent sets of City Cliffs symbols comes with a set of red sandstone symbols and fills! So that was an easy choice.

There's a knack to using connecting symbols effectively. Sometimes that means turning-off their ability to connect, and placing them individually. Sometimes you can just let them "have their head" as it were, and make whatever pattern they will. Usually, that latter works fine for straight, gently undulating, or long curving lines. When it comes to more intricate structures, it can be better to opt for individual symbol placement. Here though, despite the strongly curving lines in a short space, I decided to try using the connecting-symbol option, and see what happened, because this area was meant to look as if it had been straight-edge carve-quarried in places. It took a couple of tries to get something close to what I wanted, and then a lot more tinkering to get the shadow effects to work OK (don't look too closely behind a couple of strategically-placed trees, that's all!).

Those familiar with northern English dialect may appreciate a couple of the more curious map labels, although the Fachin's Hole name derives from real-world folklore, as something I'd decided from soon after the shape of the base map for this drawing had been chosen. A Fachin is a Scots' Gaelic fearsome Faerie creature, with one leg, one hand that protrudes from its chest, a single eye and rough, spiky hair. Sometimes considered of giant size, its preferred lairs are lonely gorges and lakes. That overall shape seemed to fit with the cliff-line being a loose, crude profile image of such a creature, with the Well as its eye.

Yep, I think many of us have learnt far more than we wanted to about the murkiness of copyright and IP laws in different parts of the world in recent months, thanks to events elsewhere in the RPG world.

Bottom line is it's probably safer to create your own new maps from scratch, than try copying anything someone else has done, however varied, especially when you're intending to make money from doing so.

Might want to tweak the angle of the seating a little for the rows nearest the outer walls; otherwise, patron complaints about stiff necks can be expected!

Will there be upper levels too?

Not really seeing too much looking "wrong" with your map, to be honest.

As with most styles, there will be things that seem to work better than others sometimes, and it's often just a question of knowing what options there are, and what (sometimes quite small) tweaks will help make things look closer to what you were hoping for. Sue already covered your points regarding forests, settlement placement, and terrain fill blending, I think.

For your point 3, symbol scaling, sometimes the "correct" symbol scaling just doesn't look right - or maybe not for all the available symbols - so you simply have to rescale the ones that don't look so good to fit more with how you envisaged them looking at the scale of the whole map (not zoomed-in though!).

Point 5, unknown areas. You could add areas of a standard terrain fill with no symbols or other features, and maybe add a new Sheet with a pale single-colour polygon - like a grey or white - drawn over the unknown region, and add a Transparency Effect to that, perhaps with an Edge Fade as well. Or you could try a Blur Effect on the terrain fill itself - again set it on its own Sheet so it's not ALL the terrain that does this! Blur can make the file uncomfortably large if used too frequently, however. Just trying things out with the Sheet Effects is always worth doing, so you get a better feeling for what they can do. If there are terrain features that must be in the region too, you can also partly hide them this way. It really depends what you want the area to have the players might know about in advance.