You're welcome :)

Remember to reset the default symbol scale to 1 once you have finished your forests and trees, or all your symbols will be smaller than expected.

I agree with Remy. I think we have different cultural views in play here. In the UK you can have several pubs on the same street, even today.

Thanks :)

The frame is a very long thin polygon bent around the outside of the map rather than a line. It's also filled with a texture, although it didn't look like it. What I've done is halve the width of the long thin polygon using the move node tool to bring the corners in from the outside, and replaced the fill with a solid colour you can change. I've put it on it's own layer (FRAME) and frozen the BACKGROUND and SCREEN so you can edit it in peace.

I've left the MAP BORDER layer unfrozen because if you decide to make the frame even narrower you will also have to move the green lines on the MAP BORDER layer to match the adjusted outer edge of the frame.

Hope this helps.

You could make a small symbol set of pacthes of the terrain you want to blend over in a bitmap editor, import them in the symbol manager and make a random collection of them. These are terran patches for Forest Trail.

No part of these symbols are fully opaque, as that still causes hard lines between the two shades.

Here is the result in the Ranger's Hill example map.

One country's town is another country's village and vice versa. Maybe check out any neighbouring villages that have already been mapped nearby?

That's an interesting idea.

Looks like you've got a lot of stuff sorted out already.

That's better. The labels are no longer screaming out of the map like before, but I think you may need to increase the opacity or the extent of that one glow. There's at least one label I can't easily read - the temple of Fah. I might not have adjusted it to perfection, but only enough to show you how little you could sometimes get away with.

Better again.

The thing about sheet effects is they do take a lot of tweaking to achieve perfection, so you may wake up tomorrow morning and take one look at it and decide to change it again.

I don't think it's too much, but it may still be on the borderline of too little. Small adjustments are better than large ones till you hit the sweet spot between not enough and glaring. And then there will always be issues with subtle but efficient text glows where some may still not be able to see it even though you can.

It's coming along nicely, but where Tahoma might be an extremely tidy font, but it is also extremely thin, like writing with a micro pen. You might benefit from using a slightly bolder font so it stands out a bit more from the details of the mountains. It's a non-serifed font, so consider whether it really works with the serifed Avalon Quest.

Using coloured labels can sometimes be nice, but other times it's not as clear as plain black or white labels. If you go black and white (either black text with white glow or white text with black glow) there's more contrast to lift them out of the map a little - especially with a style as beautifully detailed as Mike's.

Have you considered using text along a curve to try and space out the letters of the mountain ranges along the spine of each range?

EDIT: A note here about using black and white - sometimes you might have to use the very palest grey and the very darkest grey instead of absolute black and absolute white, as the absolute black and white can interract oddly with the very black lines and very white parts of the style.