Okay, I experimented by moving a few of the houses built with the Random Streets tool to a new "BUILDINGS - RANDOM STREETS" sheet. I was able to give these houses greater transparency than the buildings symbols to make them more similar. I also added a COLORIZE effect to make them a little grayer. But this threw off the look of the huts I tested with in the lower left corner that were also built with the Random Streets tool, so I moved those ones to a "BUILDINGS - RANDOM STREETS 2" sheet with a tan colorize effect.

The map is small enough that it's not too difficult to simply replace the random buildings with symbols, but it's an educational exercise to see if I can address it with special effects.

Here's how it turned out, starting with the full map and zooming in. Most of the test houses are in the block directly southwest of the circle part of the canal, with a few others elsewhere to see what they'd look like when the houses were on different terrain.

(Not sure why one of the huts turned browner than the others.)

Slight tweak. Something was bothering me with some of the houses southwest of the circular part of the canals. Upon inspection, I discovered that those houses built with the Random Streets tool ended up on the BUILDINGS HIGHER sheet. I removed them entirely and replaced them with the house symbols on the appropriate BUILDINGS sheet. Let me know if you see anything else that looks off.

Oops, I forgot to add a compass and scale.

Took a stab at creating a town in the lovely new Ancient Cities style by @C.C. Charron. It isn't a whole town, just the North Bank area that is the more prosperous part of the town. Only a smidge of the poorer South Bank area is shown.

Okay, here are the changes I made:

1. Added patches to the murkiness to break it up.
2. Added more bones on the right side and a pile of plundered treasure on the left. (Still not a lot of debris, though.)
3. Adding/increasing a Glow on the walls wasn't putting the tentacle corridors in a shadow like I wanted -- to get the shadow strong enough, it caused the contents in the sucker rooms to be too obscured. So I did add a shadow over the interior rooms and corridors after all.
4. Changed the Glow settings on the solid rock area of the cavern, so that the edges don't look so sharp. (I will also post the FCW in case anyone wants to recommend adjusting the settings.)
5. Moved all of the "above" rocks and weeds to a special layer that can be hidden or shown.
6. Added an entire layer of rocks to that new layer of varying sizes (up to 5x or 6x, I believe). I used the "symbols in area" function to scatter weedy rocks around, and then filled in.
7. Added a wall mask so that the constructed walls no longer cast a shadow on the excavated cave walls. Midway through, I realized that I could simplify my painstaking efforts by copying my constructed walls to another wall sheet above the mask, this one with no effects. The walls below the mask cast the shadows and glow; the wall above the mask has no effects, but allowed me to be a little sloppy in drawing the walls mask. (At the very end, I realized I could have simplified it even further by copying the cave walls to the Walls Mask sheet.)

Thoughts?

Thoughts?