The Independent Dominion of Princelless

[Ascension]

Everything looks fine to me but if you want to keep the drop shadow then you need to put a stroke around the letters so that the shadow doesn't interfere so much. Nice job. As far as the houses...well, cities are the hardest things we do so there are about as many different ways to do them as there are stars in the heavens. The easiest thing would be to put a low opacity stroke around them or maybe a black inner glow, or make the drop shadow darker. The terrain, well render some clouds, then set the layer to overlay. If you want something to be lighter or darker, then use an airbrush and manually paint in those places. There's about a million different way to do these things so I would suggest reading through the other tutorials and see what grabs ya.