The water texture looks rather "busy" to my eye, but that's probably just me.

There is an issue with some of the text however, where the grey glow is blending into the background in places - on roads and buildings, especially where the road edges are outlined with narrow dark lines - e.g. "Petaluma Stockyards" and "The Heart Markets". In other places - e.g. "Northwind House", "Xi Ling's Market Gardens" - the text itself looks somewhat transparent when set above paler backgrounds. This is all based on the Gallery image, incidentally. However, it did look as if there problems with the text in parts of even the lower-res whole-map view posted above here.

The bulk of the city seems a little empty of named places. Maybe even a few major street names might help here, although perhaps a few of the larger or different-looking properties might be named as well/instead?

Unfortunately, as Sue mentioned, the appearance of the acne-pitted texture changes as you zoom in or out to the map, and you may find too that it appears different again when you prepare an exported image (resolution-dependent). This makes it difficult to rely on this appearance when drawing maps.

The broken-open eggs could use a more ragged broken edge. They look much too neat presently. And again, sorry Sue!

That's fine. Didn't realise the gallery map might be different to what you'd posted here, and assumed the close-ups were from the final version.

Technically, it's not simply the colour, it's the effects on the sheets involved as well, but it happens when identically-coloured pixels overlap one another, if I've understood it correctly.

If changing the colour doesn't solve it, you can alternatively try copying the text to a new sheet with no effects on it, either above or below the current text sheet, but above whatever sheet is causing the interference (i.e. the contours sheet here, probably). I've found sometimes this works only in one configuration, then in another map, only in a different one. No idea why, as it's not happened all that often.

If you're struggling to work out the general sizes of things as a whole, you might find it useful to look through some real-world maps, like an atlas, a map of your local area and your own town, for instance. That should give you some ideas about the amount of detail visible on different area-sizes of map.

It might help you too to draw out some sketch-maps by-hand first of what you're wanting to create in CC3+, as that way you can get a rough idea of what size of map is going to better-fit the map you're wanting to draw once you start-up in the program. Even if you don't get it right this way, you can always resize the map in CC3+ if you find the area's too large, or not large enough. We've all been there!