Elemental Forums
Every time I research farming the option to build a farm never appears in my first town, but any town I build afterward can build farms. I don't know if this applies to only my first town because I normally research farming before building a second.
I did not notice this problem. I could build farms in all my cities.
Was the farm in question already in the influence area of your town?
As farm can only be build on fertile land, if you haven't any fertile land near your city, the option to build one won't appear, even if you have researched the technology.
This happens to me as well. It sometimes doesn't let you build a farm even though you're next to fertile land. I have a hard time understanding when and why this happens. It's definitely not because there's no fertile land next to the city.
Because of this problem I find it would be nice to have the Farm, Mine etc improvements visible on the list but colored red or some such if there is no special tile around. That way we know the game at least recognizes that we have the tech ready.
What was your city level, what was the distance of the fertile tile and the center of your city and how buildable tiles are still left for your city? If you have only 3 tiles left, you won't be able to build a farm that requires 4 tiles. And if you have a level 1 city and the fertile land doesn't touch (even with just a corner) the center of your city, you won't be able to build the farm unless your city levels up.
I guess that's the issue, it was one tile too far away or something. One more reason to at least have some feedback in the build menu as to why the farm isn't buildable. It's a problem that you can't clearly see how far away you can build improvements. Really unintuitive for a new player, this current system. I'd rather there be clear borders within which you can build improvements and get rid of the 'adjacent to existing buildings' requirement. The Tetris minigame isn't that interesting.
It's not a tetris 'minigame', it's a rather sensible restriction. Your city has to be one contiguous block.
Makes the cities look really blocky - having the buildings a bit more dispersed and then add some cosmetic touches (roads, fences, fields) to make it look like more of a settlement would do wonders.
Several buildings (lumber mill, fishery) don't follow those rules, and for the ones that do it really is like a tetris minigame as you find a way to snake your city out to the resource you want. I have cities with a single wide string of 1x1 buildings that stretches out far from the city until it touches a mine or fertile tile like 6-8 tiles away, I don't see that being very sensible. You don't see farms or coal mines in the middle of New York city.
That's why you build a pioneer and have the pioneer (or ironeer, if you're Gilden) go build an outpost (or whatever it's called) on the resource you want to harvest.
Edit: I should note that I'm not sure that you can do a pioneer for fishery/lumber, but for ore, horses (once the horse techs go in anyway), etc. you can.
I see no reason to use those outposts or whatever. There's no negative side effect to simply building another city and stretching it out to reach as many resources as possible. It looks silly but it's the better choice gameplay wise. Maybe they should make it so mines and such can only be built at outposts.
Re-railing this topic...
I've had this happen to me as well. In a recent game, I am unable to build a farm, fishery, or granary. I'm going to reload the save and see if it pops up again.
EDIT: Reloaded the save and confirmed. I have a beach tile, free space in the city, and all the money and materials required. I am still unable to build a fishery. I believe the farm is unable to be built as well. Rage.
I think fisheries are bugged all around. Most of the time I can build them on dry land, and wherever I do build them they never finish construction visually (they always look like a construction site, even hundreds of turns later). I thought I saw somewhere that building them on land was normal but they'd only produce 5 food instead of 10, but I still only get 5 food from them when they are on a beach.
You can only build a farm on fertile land, and you can only build a granary if you have a farm in the city.
By or next to? You have to be touching the fertile land with one of your buildings to place a farm on it IIRC.
Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.