Hi Sam :)

I can see that you have spent some time thinking about this map. It shows in the details.

I have to confess that a wall of text is not an easy thing for me to absorb and process all in one go, so my comment is a general suggestion more than anything. I can also see that you're already doing some of these things.

When you start a map get the coastline set down first and then lay down the mountains, deserts, plains, rivers, swamps and forests in that order, and spend some time tweaking each of those things as you work until you are happy with the entirety of the wilderness in its natural state. You might need to increase some of the Edge Fade Inner widths to make the blending of terrains look more natural, for example. I am forever doing that in my own overland maps, and can end up with EFIs that are hundreds of miles wide. But that's how it is in the real world. Normally anyway, unless mankind has interfered with irrigation or by mowing down the forest. Where you reach the edge of a forest and want to blend it into a more open savannah landscape, The trees need to be placed more gradually further apart, rather than suddenly being more spaced out. Its more of a sliding scale than a sudden change - a gradient fill of trees. Notice how they also tend to grow in small clumps of 3 or more. Isolated large trees with even spacing is more orchard-like - more manmade.

Once you are happy with your uninhabited world you can then consider where the best soil would be for farmland and how easy it would be for early settlers to get to it and use it. Then clear some of the forest or plough some of the plains and finally place the settlements where they would be most likely to occur, given the local availability of food, resources, trade and defendable situations.

Most villages grow up where fishing, mining, trade or farming is good. Those among them which also find themselves to be on a major trade route for everyone else also tend to become market towns, places of worship and administration - eventually cities if they also happen to be not too difficult to defend.

All of these are considerations I use myself. Some of them you might not agree with, but we each have our own way of working out what goes where. I hope at least some of it helps :)

EDIT: I forgot to say (because I was too busy trying to write suggestions without rambling too much) that's a pretty good map as it is :)

This is a real wild card, since I'm more of an artist than a tech, but Remy had this suggestion to a similar but not identical issue a while back. You could try this?

I recommend closing CC3 and running that exe file from the directory.

The span of the sheet effect is greater than the span of the rendering pass, so when the pass just misses the polygon it doesn't recognise the sheet effect and doesn't render it.

There is an overlap between passes designed to reduce this problem, but it isn't always large enough. The best way to get rid of most of it is to increase the span of the rendering pass.

Type EXPORTSETMPPP and hit enter. The command line will show you a number. If you haven't ever changed the setting before it will be 4000000 (four million). Type 40000000 (40 million) and hit enter, then try again.

I can paint, draw, and even sculpt reasonable looking trees out of wire and modelling clay, but I'm still crap at watercolour.

You, on the other hand, are great at it - even when there are no actual watercolours in sight :)

That is the difference between vector symbols and bitmap symbols.

For reasons of performance I think, the bitmap symbols are redrawn twice, which means that not many sheet effects apply to them, or apply only to the first time the symbol is drawn.

You could try this:

Type DELAYDRAWSYM and hit enter, so that the prompt appears in the command line at the bottom, and then type zero and hit enter again, then redraw the map. It stops the second redrawing of the symbol.