Compound paths & graphic style problem (map related)

Hi all,
Been banging my head against a wal with this all morning. I'm hoping one of you can help.
I need to replace portions of a map - it' slots and lots of shapes representing buildings.The original file has shapes made of compound paths (see illustration below). That's great, because the center needs to be knocked out (there are some items underneath that occasionally show through). I thought I'd try to create a graphic style to replicate the look as closelty as possible, but I cannot get a fill to act as a knockout - so I have the basic shape and effect that I want, but with a colored center instead of a knocked-out one. This is a problem becuase I'll be changing dozens of shapes and I don't want to have to recreate the look on each shape manually.
Here's a pic to help clarify. The original is on the left, my attempted recreation is on the right. Help!

First, thansk so much for the help! I'm soooo close, but I keep doing something wrong. Let me run through my steps to see if you can spot where I'm falling down:
Draw my rotated box (I Object> Compound Path > Make converted it to a compound path becuase I assuemd I'd need that when applying a knockout. I may be wrong there).:
Fill with white, copy the fill and fill with brown:
Apply a Transform effect to the 2nd fill (I need the numbers to be absolute, not scale, becuase I need to apply thsi to a variety of shapes but achieve a uniform look):
I then go to the Opacity on that second layer and check Knockout:
But when I drop the Opacity down to 0% (with knockout checked) that entire fill layer just goes transparent:
And if I apply the Knowckout - Opacity settings to the main opacity at teh bottom, the whole thing goes blank:
Incidentally, here's the shape I'm trying to replicate (I know my attempt doesn't reproduce the connected lower left and upper right rounded corners):
And here's a small chunk of the map. I'll be changing dozens of these shapes and want to apply that consistent look to them without doing each one manually.
G'ah! It's driving me nuts! What am I doing wrong?

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As I said it's for shading the pictures I'm working on. I've iterated and tried through a bunch of techniques. For example gradient meshes on my first few real works. Now those meshes don't do well with complex shapes, which previously I alleviated by using a simple square or rectangle gradient mesh and using the original colored shape as a clipping mask. That did work, but it was a huge lot of work.
After a bunch of attempts at that I went over to using simple gradients as a background for the shape and then I'm doing the shading freehand with the blob brush tool, using a graphic style and filters to make it look right. That's better, but properly making all the clipping masks takes me much longer than anything else.
Now the problem is that the shading is not supposed to go over the lines, which is impossible to do properly without either messing up the order, or using clipping masks, hence the script. Because you know, if you use a blob brush with a strong Gaussian blur close to the lines you'll end up with stuff on both sides. If you don't start close to the line the shading won't look right if the darkest part of the shade needs to be close to the line. And that's where clipping masks do magic.
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After I have traced a sketch, adjusted the line widths and everything to look neat I turn the paths to outline strokes and then make them into a live paint group (which would mess up the line widths, unless you turn the paths into outline strokes first).
With that live paint group it takes me just a few minutes to flat color my piece. Then I expand the live paint group, in case of doubt spend some more minutes to make compound paths from all areas I need to shade in one piece, then I select all the areas and use my script to turn them into neat clipping masks. Then I can click any area, enter the isolation mode and go up one level so I'm in the appropriate group, where I can shade freely without the problem of going over the lines.
At the end that allows me to apply a complex and in-depth shading, without wasting any time to get there.
PS: Well, I just found out that Draw Inside is pretty darn close to what I want to do, and oddly enough it produces the same visual discrepancy with compound paths that my script produces. I'll be taking a closer look at that, though my script does a little more than just the clipping mask stuff, so maybe I'll go for a hybrid solution. Whatever makes for a better workflow.

Compound paths & graphic style problem (map related)

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