Manual Terraforming Methods

[Hopkins Viorel 0]

This might come off as weird but... does anybody know any tips about manually terraforming a region? By "manually", I mean using the tools within SimCity 4, no import image or anything like that: just getting into the city tiles and painting the terrain.
I love painting the terrain in such a way, but things can be quite frustrating sometimes. I know about the reconcile edges feature, but I still have problems with them. For example, there are a lot of times where I would love to reconcile only one edge of the map, but the tool reconcile all four at the same time. Honestly, what I'm looking for is really only abut methods and tips from those who like to manually paint the landscape like this. 
I will be honest with you guys and say that the edges between the tiles is my main problem, really. Even with reconcile edges, you can kind of notice them in the regional view just by looking at the topography itself; they tend to be smoother, specially with mountains (water bodies, plains and plateus are okay, big problem really lies with altitude transitions). I already opted to work with regions composed entirely with the largest city tiles; this reduces the number of edges between cities, thus reducing the effect of this problem.
But apart from this, any other artistic tip is welcomed too (how to paint better mountains or lakes, where to place forests, an interesting way to create a geological feature).

[matias93 7,535]

Reconciling is really super hard without external editing tools, but you can try some options:

1. Use the terrainquery cheatcode to survey and fix specific points in both sides to use as a reference. For example, if you have a hilltop divided in two cities, you can check with terrainquery if the altitude of the top is the same in both sides, and if not, correct it with precision.
2. Use a set of customised slope mods and use networks to terraform. For example, if you know that the el-rail tool makes slopes of 15 metres each 6 tiles (as mine does), you can make soft slopes with that one, while using the street tool (that gets those same 15 metres of altitude over only 2 tiles) to get more steepness. This is particularly useful for detailed fixes and to preserve slopes when building over them.
3. Adjust the size of the terraforming tools with the number keys. When using any of the terraforming tools, you can press any number key and have them resize from bigger to smaller, allowing finer control or a less tedious application.

Still, you'll most surely still find weird artifacts even if you get the terraforming perfectly. For example, the (unfinished) moisture simulator of the game tends to assume that the western margin of all cities is the wettest, and so in the regional view you'll always get weird bands of wetter terrain at the western margins of cities. You can somewhat mitigate this by using ploppable water effects (like the ones in JENX Poseidon Mod) to force the moisture simulation to identify another side as the wettest, but this will also affect your overall moisture distribution, which is particularly evident in sloped terrain. Depending on the compatibility of your terrain and tree mods, your sloped terrain will change colour accordingly, and the god mode trees you make grow will be of different species.

Most of this will probably sound very confusing if you don't get a clearer view of how moisture works in the game, so I recommend you to first check this fantastic dev thread by Corina Marie: