Desperately seeking tips for NAM

[Major from Bajor 24]

Hey guys,

 

I finnally managed to get this game with all the mods, been fan for years and playing other versions of SimCity, from C64, Amiga to PocketPC, but somehow Sim City 4 always had a bug.

 

Now that I finally have working version with all the mods and whistles, I'm stuck with NAM. I refuse to play without it, seeing what it can do, making cities looking more organic and natural, but I find it incredibly difficult/impossible to use. I mean, in its very basic functionality, for starters: makin natural looking road.

 

I rotate the pieces with tab and change orientation with Home and End, but every time my road simply gets to the point where there's simply no continuation. Whatever I choose, nothing fits. So I flatten the piece I think is problematic, only to find it was the only one that could have continued the piece before it... and so on. Really makes me wanna punch the screen.

 

So what would you advise to a newbie? Besides stuff in official Manual, which are to no avail to me?

 

Thanks in advance!

[rsc204 21,806]

It sounds like you are having problems with either puzzle pieces or starter pieces, there is no simple one rule to solve all your problems, some of these items just require a bit of experience before you become comfortable with using them, each can have their own little niches.

 

The NAM manual PDFs are very well written, have pictures illustrating key points and really help you to get the most out of the product, I'm not sure what you mean "are to no avail to me"? If you have a specific question regarding a specific task it's pretty easy to give you an answer, but if your question is generally how the whole thing works, well your best option is the readme. In case you didn't know, these are installed in the SimCity 4 folder (not the plugins folder) in a folder named NAM Auxillary Files\Documentation. Once again if there is a specific part you don't understand or would like further explanation on, people here will no doubt assist in a timely manner. It is very hard however to answer such general questions.

 

Generally speaking, you do want to flatten any area you will be placing puzzle pieces beforehand, often these will not place unless they are on flat land without any bumps.

 

Some pieces will plop on top of the existing network, others will not and the existing network may need to be deleted and then reconnected.

[Major from Bajor 24]

This is a repeat, but ok:) So I have very specific issue with not being able to continue the road with any of available puzzle pieces, no matter which piece I choose or how I orient it or where I place the cursor. There does seem to be a little bump there though....

 

So it's perfectly possible that NAM road can't be continued with NAM's puzzles or "normal" road if terrain isn't completely flat? I'm not talking about hills and slopes, just a little bump on the beach... It's should have been just a road that more or less follows contours of the coast.

 

So if small bumps can't be crossed, using NAM on hills is basically out of the question?

 

When you say "starter pieces", what do you mean? I think I understand puzzle pieces are asortment of rotatable items, I'm not sure about these.

 

I checked the docs, seem very technical and like not dealing with such $%&^! questions at all:)

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Ditch the dysconception that puzzle pieces are the answer; half of the documentation still focuses on puzzle pieces when we're undergoing a paradigm shift that phases them out.

If you're talking about the viaduct/elevated Road, One Way Road, or Avenue systems, there are draggable alternatives to those. The advantage to this is that they'll naturally smoothen out any bumps and you don't have to suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome from repeatedly placing down every individual tile.

-----

I can provide a more clear answer if, 1, I have time to give you one (I apologise in advance, I don't at the time of posting) and, 2, I know what you're talking about.

[TPB 562]

Could you provide us with a screenshot of your problem? I'm not sure I understand what you're having trouble with.

 

By road you mean normal road? Or real highway?

 

There aren't many puzzle pieces involved with roads unless its for going over or under, such as flups, viaducts, etc. In general you should be using drag method for roads.

 

There are plenty of videos on youtube where you can watch others using the NAM, I've even made a couple myself about draggable wide radius and fractionally angled (FAR) curves.

 

I recommend:

 

Haljackey's Building a City from scratch.

 

Strictoaster's Let's design Simcity 4.

 

Hope this helps.

[Tarkus 6,932]

So it's perfectly possible that NAM road can't be continued with NAM's puzzles or "normal" road if terrain isn't completely flat? I'm not talking about hills and slopes, just a little bump on the beach... It's should have been just a road that more or less follows contours of the coast.

 

So if small bumps can't be crossed, using NAM on hills is basically out of the question?

 

When you say "starter pieces", what do you mean? I think I understand puzzle pieces are asortment of rotatable items, I'm not sure about these.

 

It sounds as if you're trying to use the starter pieces as if they are puzzle pieces.  The starters generally can't be built on anything but flat terrain.  Rather than plopping a bunch of them in a row, there should be an indication on the tool tip for the particular starter, listing one of the game's default networks.  Place the starter, then drag the specified network through the starter, and it'll convert.  You'll then be able to use it on slopes.

 

Pieces that are starters are specifically marked as such. There's also FLEX pieces, which behave like starters, but are more intricate.  Standard puzzle pieces that don't have starter functionality won't have any indication of "starter" or "FLEX".

 

-Tarkus

[Major from Bajor 24]

I will post a picture, but a problem is very basic. I'm stuck with what seems to me very basic feature of this mod:

Wide Radius Road Curve Puzzle Pieces. I find it to be complete and total pain to use. The road looks amazing

while and when it works, but in 99% of cases I get stuck and can't continue with none of those pieces.

[TPB 562]

You can make all road curves without using puzzle pieces, except perhaps the small 90 degree one, which I haven't figured out how to make. But yeah, most curves can be dragged! Check out the videos I linked.

[Turjan 1,048]

You can drag wide curved roads by dragging certain road patterns, and NAM will automagically convert those to wide curves. (Edit: |What TPB saiid).

 

Regarding plopping down puzzle pieces themselves, they often object to immediately adjacent road and especially street pieces. Sometimes, you have to just remove street tiles that are immediately adjacent to a tile where one of your puzzle pieces are plopped. You can rebuild after plopping.

[Major from Bajor 24]

Hey peeps, thanks for all the input. I will check linked videos by all means, I gave up on them previously since they seemed to be dealing with more advanced features that I'm at this point far from being interested in. But if you say those show how to drag curves, I'll check them most def. Right now I'm not sure what you mean with "draging the curves", it seems I can only drag standard SC road that goes straight and curves only under 90 or 45 degrees and that's it.

 

I understand it's hard to imagine what happens between the ears of complete n. .b. when you're playing something for years and have it all in muscle memory, I attached the picture with my situation.

 

It's not something I can't live without if I don't solve, I just want to understand this and similar situations. And to get most out of NaM of course:)

 

So I hit the wall on the leftward going road in red circled area. Nothing fits there that would continue that road.

 

EDIT: I checked you're videos TPB, and I see what you're doing, but I still don't know how. Which option is that? It isn't the standard SC road since they don't have those circular widenings at the ends, and my NAM doesn't seem to be offering any dragable tools.

[Turjan 1,048]

Those are standard roads. You just draw those patterns with normal roads, and the curves will convert. With standard roads, you can also use a slope mod in order to invoke terrain smoothing. Also, remember that you can flatten terrain by placing single standard road pieces next to each other.

 

Cul-de-sacs is an option you choose during NAM installation. I recommend always using the "Custom Installation" option. It gives you much more choice over what to install and what you don't want to deal with yet, and you can run this custom installation as often as you want. It will remember the choices you made last time, so it's easy to change things.

[Major from Bajor 24]

^ There's no Cul de Sac option in my custom installation. Now, I'm ashamed to admit, but my NAM is version 2009. Is there major update after that, would that be a reason I don't have dragable curvatures?

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

^ There's no Cul de Sac option in my custom installation. Now, I'm ashamed to admit, but my NAM is version 2009. Is there major update after that, would that be a reason I don't have dragable curvatures?

 

Yes. It's called NAM 32. That's the version that has more draggable components than it did in past versions.

 

Also, according to NAM Team policy, once an older version of the NAM is phased out by a newer one, no tech support can be given for older versions. So we really can't help you with the 2009 version because, so far, everything we tried to help you with doesn't work with the old version.

[Tarkus 6,932]

Also, 2009 had four NAM releases--NAM Versions 24 through 27 (they were given month/year designations at that time--January 2009, March 2009, June 2009, and July 2009)--so even if we did support old versions, it would still be difficult to provide help, because we wouldn't know what version you were actually using, and a lot of issues from back then have been fixed..  And there's really been a ton of cool stuff that's been added since then.  The Network Widening Mod didn't exist in 2009, for one.

 

-Tarkus

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

^ There's no Cul de Sac option in my custom installation. Now, I'm ashamed to admit, but my NAM is version 2009. Is there major update after that, would that be a reason I don't have dragable curvatures?

 

Sometimes there's several major updates in a year.      It's been 6 years; do keep up!  

[Major from Bajor 24]

Thanks to all the people trying to help:)

 

OK, now I have NAM 32 installed. I checked the instructions regarding my problem.

I think it's Draggable FAR and wide radius curves part.

 

Too bad there's no single word on how to use, only the pictures of how it was "before", and how it is since NAM 31.

 

I still can't do what TPB did in the video. I click roads, first option on the top (normal road), draw the diagonal or make 90 angle turn, click in the turning point or around it and it still doesn't curve like in video or in those picture. Basically what I get is stuff on "before" pictures in the manual...

 

Sorry for asking to be fed with a spoon, I know it's easy and obvious to you, but it simply doesn't seem to be working in my case. Do I need to hold something, like shift or control while dragging those curves? Can somebody tell me in few words, treating me like complete idiot, what to click and where? Or any other videos dealing with this very basic feature apart from TPB's?

 

Sorry, thanks:)

 

I know you like pics:), so attached is the mess I get when I try to do what I think is needed to get FARs. I installed default options plus cul-de-sacs.

 

 

 

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

One of the things that is a great convenience with recent NAM releases is that you can run the installer as often as you like.  Like all skeptics, I run the custom install and choose what I want.  At the moment I have not loaded RHW, GLR, RRW and I have serious reservations about Project Symphony and don't add it either.

[Major from Bajor 24]

I ran installer second time and checked, all FAR options are included.

Btw, if I opt to not include certain options in later runs through installer,

will that brake looks of the city if I used them previously, or will it leave previously used/now not included items untouched?

 

Can I/you live without Traffic manager (is that the name?), I mean that traffic managing module that is reported to use resources like crazy? My computer doesn't eat small mammals if you know what I mean, so I thought maybe save myself frustration when the region develops.

[rsc204 21,806]

To give you an idea of how to drag FAR Roads:

 

Imagine a box that is 8 tiles long and 2 tiles high. Drag one horizontal road from the top left of this box by 5 tiles to the right. Drag a second road from the bottom right of this box 5 tiles to the left. As the two sections meet they should auto-connect to create a FAR S-curve. Now if you make that box only 6 tiles long and drag each road in the same way, but for only 4 tiles, now you have a small section of FAR-2. Hopefully these simple explanations will help you to understand how the patterns you must draw to create draggable FAR/WRC pieces. For the rest of the pieces, see the diagrams in the NAM manual.

 

The traffic simulator is the CORE of the NAM, without it I believe the NAM would not function, moreover this fixes what is otherwise a pretty broken game due to the bugs left in SC4 by Maxis, so it's kind of essential. If your computer is struggling with the entire (a large part of) the NAM installed, consider which items you actually want to use and make a custom install to lower the strain on your PC. NAM 32 should run a custom controller compiler during the install, if you get errors then you need to look into that, without it you won't benefit from the reduced-size custom version, which is especially useful for improving performance.

[TPB 562]

Alright let's see.

 

First of all, I'm surprised how many veteran players still manually clicks their way through to find basic tools which can be accessed with keyboard shortcuts in a fraction of the time.

 

These are the ones you absolutely should learn as a minimum, in my opinion:

 

Tool                Key Combo

 

Road                     R

Street                ALT + R

Avenue             CTRL+R

 

Powerline               L

Pipes                     I

 

Bulldoze                B

Unzone                 V

 

There are many more. You can find a very complete list if you search for SC4 Keyboard Shortcuts. 

 

Anyway back to our issue.  Unfortunately I don't own a microphone for the time being, so I can't make you a video the way I'd like to, which makes explaining things a bit harder.

Nevertheless, I have taken the liberty of making another video. This time I go a bit slower, hopefully  you can get a basic grasp of draggable wide radius curves and FAR

(which I still am having trouble with as you'll see... it's not that easy).

 

Watch on youtube for HD!

 

 

So yeah, there are 2 types of FAR, FAR2 and FAR3, and they work a bit differently. All this is kind of hard to explain with just text. You'll just have to keep practising and watching videos

 

 

Once you learn to use them you can create really smooth curves by combining these three types so it's really worth it:

 

 

The hardest part for me is transitioning between FAR2 and FAR3.

I always keep a browser page open with the NAM manual FAR images to help me learn as I go along. 

 

Don't give up man, as someone said recently, and I concur, "it took me the best part of a year to learn how to use FAR with ease".

 

Hope this helps

 

p.s. I just created a new channel for SC4 stuff, in case you were planning to subscribe *hint hint*

      I'll be getting a microphone soon and hopefully creating cooler videos.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

Side note, but I just wanna clarify a few things:

 

FAN  - Fractionally Angled Networks, a general term for any non-orthogonal or non-diagonal network

FA3 - The angle designation for a network with a rise-run ratio of 1/3

FA2 - The angle designation for a network with a rise-run ration of 1/2

 

If you take out the N from FAN and replace it with R, you have Fractionally Angled Road. Replacing the N with the following will give you:

 - RR - Railroad

 - RRW - RealRailway

 - A or AVE - Avenue

 - S - Street

 - RHW - RealHighway

 

And be careful with the numbers; although it's technically correct to say FAR-2 and FAR-3, that only applies if FANWM doesn't exist. If you use that format, how do you call RD-4? Typically, numeric designations like that denote the width of a network in lanes, which is why we have the weird situation where we have FAAVE-4 pieces, even though its proper name should be FA3 Avenue (and even more technically, to show no bias towards the NWM, the 4 on AVE-4 should be dropped entirely, and AVE should just be spelt out as Avenue, so's to not be confused with the NWM's equivalent of the Avenue network).

 

The proper naming format for any FA network should be this: FA<angle> <Network Name>-<Network width, if applicable>

 

I'm just saying it's OK to say FAR-2 or FAR-3. It's just gonna be a problem if you have a situation with FARHW, where there are multiple networks of variable widths and variable angles, so "FARHW-4" would be completely ambiguous.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

Thanks to all the people trying to help:)

 

OK, now I have NAM 32 installed. I checked the instructions regarding my problem.

I think it's Draggable FAR and wide radius curves part.

 

Too bad there's no single word on how to use, only the pictures of how it was "before", and how it is since NAM 31.

 

I still can't do what TPB did in the video. I click roads, first option on the top (normal road), draw the diagonal or make 90 angle turn, click in the turning point or around it and it still doesn't curve like in video or in those picture. Basically what I get is stuff on "before" pictures in the manual...

 

Sorry for asking to be fed with a spoon, I know it's easy and obvious to you, but it simply doesn't seem to be working in my case. Do I need to hold something, like shift or control while dragging those curves? Can somebody tell me in few words, treating me like complete idiot, what to click and where? Or any other videos dealing with this very basic feature apart from TPB's?

 

Sorry, thanks:)

 

I know you like pics:), so attached is the mess I get when I try to do what I think is needed to get FARs. I installed default options plus cul-de-sacs.

 

Hmm you said you looked at the manual, but your pictures don't really match the patterns.  You've got the grid on, which is the most important first step.

 

For FAR-2 you want to drag like so (don't connect these roads perpendicularly, just drag as the lines show):

 

 

 

Notice the 2x2 boxes it makes (hence the name FAR-2):

 

 

 

So for FAR-3, the pattern becomes 2x3 boxes:

 

 

 

Except that transitioning from FAR-3 into straight road is very tricky.  You must draw exactly the following:

 

 

 

Transitioning from FAR-2 to FAR-3 isn't so hard:

 

 

 

And finally, some common curves:

 

 

 

Easy enough?  (Note: I didn't really think about color-blindness while making this tutorial, so if that applies to anyone these images may not be very helpful)

[Major from Bajor 24]

First of all guys, you are GOLDEN. This is far more help than I hoped for.

 

 

To give you an idea of how to drag FAR Roads:

 

Imagine a box that is 8 tiles long and 2 tiles high. Drag one horizontal road from the top left of this box by 5 tiles to the right. Drag a second road from the bottom right of this box 5 tiles to the left. As the two sections meet they should auto-connect to create a FAR S-curve. Now if you make that box only 6 tiles long and drag each road in the same way, but for only 4 tiles, now you have a small section of FAR-2. Hopefully these simple explanations will help you to understand how the patterns you must draw to create draggable FAR/WRC pieces. For the rest of the pieces, see the diagrams in the NAM manual.

 

This is better advice for newbies than anything written in manual (sorry authors:) related to FARs. And it works! So I definitely have FARs, I just have to learn how to use them. What got me on the wrong track in videos I've seen is that it looks FAR easier (ha pun:) than it is. People weave those FARs like it's nothing without really explaining what they actually do. So from videos you get impression that the game will somehow "read" what you want to do if you draw something remotely similar to actual thing, when in fact you have to draw exact pattern.

 

 

Alright let's see.

 

First of all, I'm surprised how many veteran players still manually clicks their way through to find basic tools which can be accessed with keyboard shortcuts in a fraction of the time.

 

These are the ones you absolutely should learn as a minimum, in my opinion:

 

Tool                Key Combo

 

Road                     R

Street                ALT + R

Avenue             CTRL+R

 

Powerline               L

Pipes                     I

 

Bulldoze                B

Unzone                 V

 

There are many more. You can find a very complete list if you search for SC4 Keyboard Shortcuts. 

 

Anyway back to our issue.  Unfortunately I don't own a microphone for the time being, so I can't make you a video the way I'd like to, which makes explaining things a bit harder.

Nevertheless, I have taken the liberty of making another video. This time I go a bit slower, hopefully  you can get a basic grasp of draggable wide radius curves and FAR

(which I still am having trouble with as you'll see... it's not that easy).

 

Watch on youtube for HD!

 

So yeah, there are 2 types of FAR, FAR2 and FAR3, and they work a bit differently. All this is kind of hard to explain with just text. You'll just have to keep practising and watching videos

 

 

 

Once you learn to use them you can create really smooth curves by combining these three types so it's really worth it:

 

 

 

The hardest part for me is transitioning between FAR2 and FAR3.

I always keep a browser page open with the NAM manual FAR images to help me learn as I go along. 

 

Don't give up man, as someone said recently, and I concur, "it took me the best part of a year to learn how to use FAR with ease".

 

Hope this helps

 

p.s. I just created a new channel for SC4 stuff, in case you were planning to subscribe *hint hint*

      I'll be getting a microphone soon and hopefully creating cooler videos.

 

Agreed about shortcuts. I use them in every program whenever I can. Even in Outlook for every small thing, but in SC they are absolutely crucial when you build, delete, build again, then build something else... I think I looked up for SC shorts exactly five minutes before your post:) And you got yourself a subscriber

 

Regarding complexity of FAR's... it's indeed more than I expected. Not realizing that is what got me stuck. In fact NAM as an addon is more to digest than the whole standalone SC4 game.

 

 

 

Side note, but I just wanna clarify a few things:

 

FAN  - Fractionally Angled Networks, a general term for any non-orthogonal or non-diagonal network

FA3 - The angle designation for a network with a rise-run ratio of 1/3

FA2 - The angle designation for a network with a rise-run ration of 1/2

 

If you take out the N from FAN and replace it with R, you have Fractionally Angled Road. Replacing the N with the following will give you:

 - RR - Railroad

 - RRW - RealRailway

 - A or AVE - Avenue

 - S - Street

 - RHW - RealHighway

 

And be careful with the numbers; although it's technically correct to say FAR-2 and FAR-3, that only applies if FANWM doesn't exist. If you use that format, how do you call RD-4? Typically, numeric designations like that denote the width of a network in lanes, which is why we have the weird situation where we have FAAVE-4 pieces, even though its proper name should be FA3 Avenue (and even more technically, to show no bias towards the NWM, the 4 on AVE-4 should be dropped entirely, and AVE should just be spelt out as Avenue, so's to not be confused with the NWM's equivalent of the Avenue network).

 

The proper naming format for any FA network should be this: FA<angle> <Network Name>-<Network width, if applicable>

 

I'm just saying it's OK to say FAR-2 or FAR-3. It's just gonna be a problem if you have a situation with FARHW, where there are multiple networks of variable widths and variable angles, so "FARHW-4" would be completely ambiguous.

 

Thanks, this is very informative.

 

 

Hmm you said you looked at the manual, but your pictures don't really match the patterns.  You've got the grid on, which is the most important first step.

 

For FAR-2 you want to drag like so (don't connect these roads perpendicularly, just drag as the lines show):

 

 

 

Notice the 2x2 boxes it makes (hence the name FAR-2):

 

 

 

So for FAR-3, the pattern becomes 2x3 boxes:

 

 

 

Except that transitioning from FAR-3 into straight road is very tricky.  You must draw exactly the following:

 

 

 

Transitioning from FAR-2 to FAR-3 isn't so hard:

 

 

 

And finally, some common curves:

 

 

 

Easy enough?  (Note: I didn't really think about color-blindness while making this tutorial, so if that applies to anyone these images may not be very helpful)

 

 

This is fantastic:) But do I actually need to count "pixels" (tiles)? Because when I do what I think is the pattern for Big 90 degree curve, I get exactly the pattern picted here, it doesn't really curve? Or diagonal part mustn't be longer than 2 tiles?

 

Anyways, now that I'm sure I have proper NAM with FAR's I know I'll get to grips with it somehow. So, since dragables seem so much easier (though not easy) to work with than puzzle pieces, do latter have their place or are they like legacies from previous versions?

 

I'll post a picture later of my roads breaking by a pixel or two right or left on uneven terrain. I'm not sure whether or not I have only cosmetic problem there with working road or not:)

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

do I actually need to count "pixels" (tiles)?

 

 

There's a reason I put the grid on those pictures (in red).  None of these patterns can be scaled to another size.  All of them must be the exact size in tiles as pictured.  Tiles are extremely important in this game when it comes to placing transit networks.....or even anything.  For example, most high-wealth skyscrapers grow on 4x4 lots.  The number of tiles is absolutely key.

[Major from Bajor 24]

^ Got it.

 

OK, here's what looks like a small problem. Can you tell me if I got fully functional road here, slightly warped looks notwithstanding? It's road made from FARs, is it to be expected on such bumpy terrain?

 

 

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

Nah, you're just off with the pattern.  Look at this analysis, notice the teal boxes don't touch like they do in my tutorial:

 

You should never have 1 tile width of road in the middle of FAR.  You should have 2 side-by-side roads at all times.

 

 

 

If you give me a screenshot of that exact area with the road cleared away I can show you exactly where to put things.

[Major from Bajor 24]

Nah, you're just off with the pattern.  Look at this analysis, notice the teal boxes don't touch like they do in my tutorial:

 

You should never have 1 tile width of road in the middle of FAR.  You should have 2 side-by-side roads at all times.

 

 

If you give me a screenshot of that exact area with the road cleared away I can show you exactly where to put thing

 

Thanks a lot man, won't bother you with that (I think, unless I get really stuck:) What's important is that I know it's not normal look of the road so I will try to make it right, now that I know a lot more, thanks to you all.

 

But I find a little strange that NAM "offered" me those solutions in these places. I thought it wouldn't be possible to build NAM curves at all if it won't look right in the end.

[Indiana Joe 1,750]

Thanks a lot man, won't bother you with that (I think, unless I get really stuck:) What's important is that I know it's not normal look of the road so I will try to make it right, now that I know a lot more, thanks to you all.

 

But I find a little strange that NAM "offered" me those solutions in these places. I thought it wouldn't be possible to build NAM curves at all if it won't look right in the end.

 

 

Well remember it's not intuitive.  It's cold, calculating code that turns patterns into pieces.  You were inadvertently drawing some patterns that created certain FAR pieces, but they weren't lining up properly.  In fact if you look carefully you were drawing a series of FAR-2-to-Straight curves.

 

It can actually get annoying sometimes if you're trying to put some roads close together and the code creates some FAR where you don't want it.  For example, this is recognized as FAR, but obviously is not correctly aligned:

 

 

 

You see, there's no processing involved in draggable FAR code.  It is simply an override; two stretches of road, 2 tiles long, adjacent to each other are changed to look like so.  (It is, of course, a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea.)

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

We'll get that Bajoran to join the Federation yet, eh?

[TPB 562]

I gotta say thank you Indiana Joe, those diagrams are very helpful! 

 

Major, I noticed your roads are kind of "bumpy" in your images... have you had a look at Slope Mods? These are wonderful little creations that can help a lot to create realistic roads, as they reduce that ugly bumpiness and make it smooooooth

 

I use Ennedi's slope mod, mountain version.

 

For the large 90 degree road, there is a little detail which may be what's causing you trouble with it.

 

Again, images speak a thousand words so here it goes: 

 

BIG EDIT: I just realized this changes if you rotate the camera view.. so it is something about the way networks get drawn on the grid, rather than the direction in which one drags... but anyway, you get the point, it's easier if you drag four tiles to trigger the curve.