How to make flat land with steep drop in sea level

[Danicobras]

I faintly remember seeing other members having maps with completely flat land and steep drops where the beaches would be. Essentially a good map for harbors/seaports. I'm having the hardest time figuring out how to manipulate the land and I could swear there was/were a mod(s) for that. Anybody know what I'm talking about?

[tvrcars]

http://www.simpeg.com/forum/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=250 Dont know if this the thing you are talking about but it still might be worth a look, you will have to join simpeg to download the pdf file

[Danicobras]

That very well might be what I was looking for, it's certainly helpful. Thanks.

[FrankU]

I did make those kind of maps for myself. Usually I started building them with Wouanagaine's TerraFormer. It has tools for perfect flat terrain and perfect flat seabeds.
One of the best features is a tool that is called "harbour", that will level the terrain on a perfect heigth for harbours. No need to think up the gound level for yourself.
Take a look on the LEX for it.

[noahclem]

There's several different techniques to terraforming that combined are extremely powerful but it takes a little practice. I'm at work so I'm not able to check my plugins setup but this should be reasonably accurate.

First, to make large areas perfectly flat you can use Wounagaine's TerraFormer as mentioned or use the god mode terraforming tool named "quick level brush" or something similar. I forget but it may be the case that you need to download some extra god mode tools to use that brush. I also find the God Mode terraforming in mayor mode mod very handy so you're able to use the god mode tools after starting a city.

To make small areas perfectly flat you can place single tiles of road (or rail, street, etc) next to each other covering the area intended to be flat. Unfortunately that doesn't work for tiles with water but you can get around that in a couple different ways. The first is temporarily using a mod that lowers the sea level such as the NAM's diagonal bridge enabler (in that case use streets for the leveling as the mod makes other networks unsuitable to leveling). Restarting the game and making temporary plugin changes is inconvenient though so you'll want something quicker at times. For that you can change the size of the mayor mode level brush using "shift" or "control" or one of those plus a number. CTRL+1 makes the brush tiny for fine control while SHIFT+largenumber helps quickly flatten larger areas. The same techniques can also be applied to the god mode tools.

Finally, you'll want the puzzle piece (not lot-based) hole diggers and raisers from the NAM. They work underwater and allow you to control the height you want down to the half meter. And speaking of accurate, I often find it useful to use the "terrain query" from buggi's extra cheats DLL to check the precise elevation of the land (or water) I'm working with when terraforming.

Combining these tools with a bit of practice should allow you to do exactly what you want, regardless of what that may be, pretty quickly. Hope this helps 

[vortext]

To add to this: what has helped me immensely with terraforming in general is the fact the tooltip always acts on the North-West corner of the tile.