I haven't read the text from the annual issue, but if the instructions feels unclear, don't hesitate to give Ralf a word about it. There are many people reading those things that don't hang around here.

I do mostly agree with JulianDracos and Kertis Henderson here. 1TB drive/16GB ram is fine, and as Julian says, a fast processor is better than a slow one with many cores, although a certain amount of cores is highly useful (I recommend 6 or more, but most CPU's will fulfill that today)

As for the screen, I fully agree with Kertis, don't get a 4K one. I used to have one on my old Work laptop, and it was a pain for most things. I prefer to go a bit higher than a full HD (1080p) screen though, I find a 1440p one much better. But there are two factors here, first of all, your eyesight, 1440p naturally makes things smaller (and buying a 1440p just to increase the scale factor in Windows is a waste), so make sure you're comfortable with the size, otherwise do go for that 1080p one. And of course, a higher resolution screen do mean CC3+ is a bit harder to run, so it should only go along with a somewhat good CPU, if you go budget on the CPU then do not get a 1440p screen.

My own laptop is a Lenovo Legion Pro 5 (1TB/16GB/i7-13000hx/RTX3070/2560x1600), a machine I find well suited to most task and pretty good value for money.

You need to use the right house tools. There are separate house tools for metric (the SS5C m ones) that uses frills that are scaled for metric maps.

This is an unfortunate bug with some of the vector symbols when you have CC3+ running on the Arm platform. CC3+ is a using the x86 instruction set, so when running on the arm cpu, there is a compatibility layer that translates the instructions from x86 to arm, but unfortunately, something goes wrong.

It is the same issue as you experienced here: https://forum.profantasy.com/discussion/13970/pete-fenlon-revisited-symbols

Unfortunately, there isn't anything we can do about it right now. I recommend staying with styles that use raster (png) symbols for now.

This is more or less what I am doing in my dynamic dungeons project. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to pick it back up in a long time, but it still exists as a proof of concept for this functionality. Hopefully I can finish it one day. There is a video showing it in action linked from the beginning of the article:

Sounds like an interesting idea. While I have no idea if something like this will be made for CC4 or not, you can already today get access to all the data needed, so that should be able to be done with an add-on, meaning even if it isn't put into CC4 by default, it should be possible to write for anyone with a bit of programming experience and put in without PF having to add anything to pave the way.

The technique Ralf showed here unfortunately only works with bitmap fills. This covers most maps, but some maps, especially maps using line-work (like the landform maps) use different techniques for the fills.

It gets a bit more complicated to scale these. I am pretty sure Ralf showed that off in a video at some time too, but I don't remember which off the top of my head. I'll see if I can find a link for a video or something else, unless someone bets me to it.

If you try with for example the Mike Schley overland style, you'll find that this trick works the way Ralf showed it if you use it on a bitmap-filled polygon, like farmland for example.

edit: Ralf demonstrating editing hatch styles in here: https://www.youtube.com/live/-zZGWKT2pN4?si=LOm5YLc6CtJAds-j&t=1187

For sharing, yes, it is completely fine. The only things that matters when sharing the file is that the recipient have the actual art files on disk. You can make as many fills as you want inside the map without that being a problem, sharing issues only becomes an issue if you manipulate the png's on disk (such as making copies of them). As long as you can see inside that fill style dialog that both versions point to the same png files, then everything is fine.

Finally in the atlas. Sorry for the delay.

As have been pointed out above, this starts to happen because your entities have too many nodes. But I want to point out the reason why this happens in the first place, namely too much fractalization. When you draw fractalized entities, CC3+ places intermediate nodes to be able to make this fractal shape, and each level of fractalization doubles the amount of nodes. This quickly gets out of hand if your setting is too high. When you draw large landmasses, it is adviced to use a lower level of fracatlization. This can be reduced using SIMPLYFY as mentioned above, but it is probably best to draw with less fractalization in the first place.