Ive been trying to come up with a solution for this for awhile. A firing solution you could say.
I used to play the game exclusively in cartographic mode back when it came out, and one solution on one of my (many underserved and quite cold) back burners would do something like those elevation lines, but to a finer degree. I've had trouble figuring out shaders though.
Otherwise I think the solutions would be pretty Lua intensive, so zooming in and looking at the terrain to find good spots is the main solution.