Sorry, mate, but you've completely misread my post. I know about the option and HAVE turned it on, but even when I reach the river or the forest through manual placement the option to build a pier or a logging camp is missing...

Bump +1

Would love to see again some planning in city layout, not only for strategic blocking. Is a BIG part of my funfactor.

If the concern is that the AI is disadvantaged by it, limit it to maybe one tile extra, any AI will reach that once the city starts to sprawl by itself (without having to write algorithms for it I would think).

I think it's WAD, and I'd like to keep it that way.  There was a discussion about this around the beginning of beta 4.

Fully agree. I understand they have this thing about wanting nice tidy city footprints, but why even have the manual placement option if they're cutting off the tree/river snaking thing. Its no worse than snaking for resource nodes, as said here. From a gaming perspective, neutering the manual placement mechanic like this is puzzling.

Plus, it makes no sense for a city to sit there and stare at those trees just a few feet away and not bother building to them to start cutting them down.. or even less sensably, build their way into a forest, clear cut to make room for buildings, and discard the trees simply because they didn't found the city inside the woods? Or we somehow can't/won't build a dock because this city was founded 200 yards from the river and not ON the river? Goosery.

They could help to control but not destroy snaking by requiring that you fully fill the tile before you can expand to the next tile. That would help to keep cities tight, but you could eventually stretch 3 or 4 tiles alltogether for access to something.

I don't have a problem with saying that you want city placement to matter, what chaps my cookies is when the viable tiles you can settle are just a tile or two from the woods or from a river, and no matter how much you want to snake to and envelop the river/forest, it's useless to you. Surely there can be a middle ground of some sort struck here?

Like I said, all I want is just someone to let us know "yeah, this looks like a bug" or "as intended".