Speaking from a tailgate party in the darkened peanut gallery parking lot, here, but I think it's intentional. I think they want it looking a bit slipshod.

When I want right angles I use Pythagoras on the measurement tool, two legs, 30m+40m=70m ground distance, 50m air distance means the 30m-40m corner's a right angle.

Mud roads and unbuilt footpaths can be used to draw guidelines onto the terrain and you get to where you can make the path nodes do what you want.

To make a nice circle, drop a mud road to a tangent point, extend it (400m walking distance is 400m diameter, πd that is 1256 and change but you can't draw a full circle, so draw a alf circle with a ~628m length, then cancel the startup tangent and complete the circle. "Easy."

They'd have to redo all connection points on buildings for roads, footpaths etc. Those do not align to the grid. So probably not going to happen.

If you look at all the buildings, you can see that they are explicitly designed to be awkward and not fit in a grid. Especially the industrial ones.

It's not completely impossible for cities, although it is hard as you can see.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Workers_And_Resources/comments/18tkdhx/square_city_in_a_real_game_and_its_neighbour/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Workers_And_Resources/comments/zx6dpz/turns_out_the_real_reason_i_wanted_to_make_a/

So sadly, it's a difference of opinion between you and the devs.

Perhaps set yourself a different obsessive challenge - if you play on naturalistic mountainous maps, without big swathes of perfectly flat land, then you're forced to think of new systems to "organize" the layout and keep things efficient - ones that are organic and conform to contour lines... which the game will obviously accommodate better than snapping everything to a perfectly aligned grid.
That's what I plan to do :-)

There are multiple tricks to align things and make almost all things straight. I would suggest people to see a youtuber called hmuda (videos is better than words to explain this).

Buildings not lining up perfectly are a nuisance, but I guess I can live. However when it comes to not being able to add a train station on a long stretch of rails because they're not the 'right' kind of straight -- that's just crazy.

You need to understand the soviet logic. Nothing needs to match, as long as you have food and vodka. Having said that, this also drives me nuts, it would be good to have a "western style" mode with alignment.

There were no grids in soviet times.

Trust me I feel ya. Hit me up if you’d like to see how I tackle it.

Since no one piped up about this yet, its worth noting that you can hold ctrl and then scroll your mousewheel for finer rotation steps. That helps somewhat.

Roads and paths are perfectly tied to the grid. There are no problems with this. But the buildings are all different sizes and have road and pedestrian connections in different places. Of course, it's just not possible to align them all exactly on the grid.

Originally posted by keng:

Roads and paths are perfectly tied to the grid.

Thats not exactly true, depending on how you lay the road plans, even in F1 locked grid mode, the road subgrid can have different amount of nodes. Which can be useful to line up building connections better. For example creating short road section will cram more nodes on it, and we can repeat that for long streach of "denser" road.

But yeah it would be better if buildings would snap so that connections end up perfect rather than to center of the model.

I realised yesterday that when I plan a street bend (at the exit from a building) and in the window it says 90°, the bend is never right-angled. It then looked right-angled at 86°-87°.

Also, when you drive along straight roads they are bumpy and crooked, the ground is not 100% flattened.

So I've given up and surrendered to the inaccurancy.

Originally posted by ling.speed:

depending on how you lay the road plans, even in F1 locked grid mode, the road subgrid can have different amount of nodes.

It can't. When locked to grid, road has a node every 5 meters (two per grid), otherwise - every 4 meters.

Wow! There's a bunch of old perfectionists here!
In fact, the side of the grid cell is not 10.00 m, but 9.75 m. Live with it now.