I do a different color palette for every map (except for commissions based on previous work). The only patterns I use regularly are stones or blocks for doing castle and wall parts and cracks patterns that I will overlay onto mountains or rocks. I tried using patterns a lot but I found it repetitive and dull so instead I rely on a combination of filters to get different effects since I like to experiment. Plus, relying on patterns make you a pattern hound and you can spend years wandering around the internet collecting patterns that you'll never use - I had thousands of them just sitting around collecting dust sort of like my font addiction - 25,000+ and I've only ever used about 10% of them. On the other hand, patterns can be of great use for a small-focus map such as a street full of roof tops or a bunch of hardwood floors for an inn. That's all just a matter of preference and scale. As for setting up a tablet, well, I have an Intuos 1 so I don't have all of those shortcuts to play with...I use the tablet to draw and the mouse for clicking things. Heck, I don't even use keyboard shortcuts very much since I only remember 4 or 5. I use old tools and old methods (when not experimenting) and every time I do something different. If I were more concerned about speed and efficiency or if I were hired by some big game company to make maps the same all of the time I'd get more into using such things but since I have a lot of time it doesn't bother me too much. The only things I really use consistently are brushes - small soft rounds (1-9 pixels) and small hard rounds (1-9 pixels) for line work (occasionally square tips and angle tips for calligraphic lines but I can use the tablet's pressure sensitivity with a round tip to get the same effect), and airbrushes (17-300 pixels) for shading. So my hand-drawn methods are fairly primitive and basic but that's all I've ever needed. My satellite and atlas styles rely on preset filter settings but I'm always twiddling the knobs a little bit for experimental purposes and I don't think I've ever used the same layer styles twice either.