You're both kinda wrong xD He wants a zoomed out view of the map to be empty. Hiding things doesn't work when you're fully zoomed out, you see a bunch of squares.
As an answer to your question: When I wanted one, I zoomed out just enough so that things could be hidden the way mentioned above. I then took print screens of the map and kept panning across. Then in paint jigsawed them all together and created the map. Takes about 10 mins to do though
