You may need a style that is more simple and straightforward with simple blocked in houses and no fancy artistic stuff going on. A highly detailed style like Darklands has a tendency to look quite horrible when printed so tiny. There wouldn't be a problem if this was intended as a poster map to put on the wall, where you might still expect to pick out the details of individual rooftops and chimneys, but it isn't.

If you have a free hand to suggest other styles I recommend something like the Ferraris Style, which is more suitable for larger areas printed small, or the more recent Tactical Maps published in April this year in the Cartographer's Annual. Something more Ordnance Survey in style than artistic. There are other relatively simple styles to chose from, of course. Have a look at what you've got and take the time to consider carefully just how much detail you really want when each house will be little more than a squashed ant in size on the finished letter-sized map.

The easiest way to do this quickly, even if your building is quite complex in shape, is to use a Color key.

The first thing I do is move the GRID sheet to just below the SYMBOLS FLAT sheet in the sheet list. This places the grid underneath the wall.

Then I add a Color key sheet effect to the GRID sheet and move it to the top of the list of sheet effects.

Ok all of that and make sure you have Solid fill and colour 6 selected as active. 6 is magenta - the same colour as was showing in the Color key effect.

Then draw a polygon on the GRID sheet that covers all the area where you don't want the grid to be visible. Here I have left a deliberate gap on the right hand side so that you can see how it was drawn.

Refresh, and the magenta polygon vanishes, taking the grid with it.

Once I move the nodes on that magenta polygon so that they cover that gap I left, I have a perfectly cropped grid.

Here is the file for that example

The other way I might do it, if I didn't want to be bothered with drawing a large and complicated magenta polygon, is by trimming the grid. Use the property picker tool to pick the grid so that you have all the right settings, and then hide everything but the floor and the grid. Then explode the grid and use Trim to entity from the Edit menu to trim the individual lines of the exploded grid to the inside of the floor extent. This usually takes longer to do than using a Color key, so I only rarely use it. There are also a few little glitches that can occur, such as lines that refuse to trim to the floor shape seen below. You can tidy them up by hand though using other types of trim.

This is the tidied up result. To make sure you don't keep accidentally selecting the separated lines of the grid, group them (as they were before you exploded them) and then make sure the grid is on the HEX/SQUARE GRID layer and freeze the layer.

As you can see, the result is the same. Perhaps the main disadvantage of trimming the grid is that it's not so easy to edit the shape of the floor.

This is the trimmed grid example.

It's probably more than a basic map. You've considered quite a lot of things a lot more carefully than you would for a sketch map. The plan of the village is realistic, and you've thought about where there might be single trees or avenues of trees instead of just blocking them down and leaving it. You've even considered that the main road might be older than the smaller roads and be more jiggly as a result of time and various deviations to the original course.

If I have any suggestions it would only be that the river banks would probably be less jiggly where it's narrower, since the water will flow faster there and tend to erode in a straighter line - unless there are huge boulders causing those jiggled edges to it's channel.

Asian Town

If you try to use the House tool to draw a long thin building it crashes every time.

Here is an FCW showing at what point the crash happens. (I saved after each successively longer building and attached the file once it crashed).

The limit seems to be somewhere around 120 feet long.

The reason such very long buildings are quite likely to be drawn is that the Mapping Guide indicates using them to draw the city walls. I noticed that the example map for that style has a building that is 175 feet long. I was trying to separate it out from the rest of the wall to take a screen shot of it with a result of the Distance tool to show you, when moving it caused a crash. Maybe it is something that has happened since the publication of Asian Town in November 2018?

It looks good to me :)

The Ferraris Style is based on the actual Ferraris map. You might find it useful to examine the original here:https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/belgium-1777/?layers=37&bbox=624622.0609151967%2C6665485.106049%2C634191.0213936471%2C6669048.982492796

This is just one section of marsh. Because the map was a team effort you will find other sections of marsh that will appear to be quite different because they were drawn by different cartographers.

The Ferraris style isn't so much an artistic style, but a historical style, so there is less emphasis on things looking beautiful, and more emphasis on the resulting map looking like it might be part of the real Ferraris map.