You need to draw the forest around the lake. The sheets are arranged so that forests will cover up lakes and rivers. Moving things around to make the lake appear on top of the trees will look very bad, because the water will be clipping the treetops in a very unnatural way.

You can either do this manually, or use the exclusion commands to have the trees placed around the lake:

For symbols, you can just hit the options button on the top of the symbol catalog option and turn off the option that symbols choose their own sheet.

That said, I recommend you don't do this. This feature is a huge time saver when mapping, and really helpful to ensure things go to the right sheet. It may sound like having more manual control is a good idea, but in practice you're just setting yourself up for much more work, and a lot of symbols on the wrong sheet because you forget to change it.

I recommend learning to use the feature in your workflow instead of turning it off. See this FAQ entry for some information:

Still about a week left of the competition, which means it is still enough time to pick and map a building (plenty of small ones available if you want to do something quick).

I'll also point out one thing to everyone planning to submit their map to the atlas too (hopefully most of you). The atlas has it's own navigation bar off the side of the map, so I do not need that little navigation box CC3+ makes for multi-floor maps in the lower right corner. Because I usually need to rename the map files when putting them into the atlas, the links in that box will be broken anyway, so I'll just have to delete it. So I would be pleased if you just remove the entire box (including the hidden hyperlinks (view -> Show Hyperlinks to show them)) before you hand in the map or at least keep in mind how the map will look when I remove it. Thanks.

Yup, it's the rendering pass. Increase the pass size.

Turn off the demographics coloring: City -> Layers -> All BLDNGs with shading

If that doesn't work, try hiding all the layers that start with BLDNG

Sure. Copying entities from one map to another doesn't change anything, so if the original maps were suitable for the atlas, then the destination will work fine as well.

Also, both for this competition and the atlas, it doesn't matter if the maps are separate files or one file with several floors on them. In the atlas, I would just hyperlink the former, but both forms work equally well. And the main prize for the competition is for the best building, doesn't matter if it is multiple fcw's or a single one with multiple floors. Also, since the atlas is just an addition to the contest, the atlas maps doesn't have to take the exact same form as the competition version, the rules are just intended for a clear and fair contest.

You don't need to make a new style, you should just make a new template for the style. Just make a copy of the existing one and edit your copy. The thing controlling the aspect ratio is the RESIZE map note, just change the contents from SCALE to STRETCH.

That's way to high. You shouldn't go higher than 40000000. You can easily calculate that number yourself. Take that 6000x6000 that you manage to export, multiply that up, and you have 36000000. That's your practical limit for how much large a map export you can do in a single pass. If you set the ppp value higher than you can handle, you'll end up making your max possible single pass size your absolute max as well, because CC3+ won't be allowed to go for more than one pass.

Do her user have access to the location you installed the program to? (i.e. can she browse to that location using windows explorer, there should be a few png files in there, can she view those in an image viewer?)

Assuming she can, on the CC3+ command prompt, try typing menudm @fcw32.mnu and hit enter. This should load the default menu file, and CC3+ does remember this between sessions, so if this works, it shouldn't have to be done again.

Just one addition to Sue's explanation above.

From the small screen shot, it looks to me that this may be an FT export? If so, it may be a multipoly (depending on your export options). If it is a multipoly, it needs to be exploded |CC2EXPLODE| first.

(Note that exploding it will also means that any "holes" [lakes] in the landmass will disappear since they will be turned into their own polys instead of defining holes in the multipoly)