Pre-1.0: Sovereign imbued land with his Essence. The "ZoC" increased as that Essence's effect grew, altering the landscape based on the alliegance of the Sov (life/death stuff).

Now: Mundane pioneer starts a settlement. It "magically" alters the landscape despite no Essence or any magic being involved.

Because pioneers don't use mana when creating cities or when recruited. It seems to be just the Sovereign's will for it to happen. From a "lore" point of view, a pity.

The Revive Land turns the tile into grassland, giving any units on the tile bonuses/debuffs as if it were inside a kingdom territory. Currently, that's 10% more attack and 10% more defense, if you are a kingdom player, and 10% less attack and 10% less defense if you are an empire player.

If you are attacking an enemy army in the territory between borders, it is a great way to give you quite a large boost. Be sure to cast it both on the tile you are attacking from, and the tile you are attacking.

Obviously this does not stack with the core environment of the tile (revive land inside kingdom territory is useless)

I was just talking about this earlier today. My thoughts are the addition of a well balanced city improvement, capable of giving small amounts of food. I am actually playing with mod to this effect right now. The idea is to add a 4 tile unlimited improvement which uses 10 specialists and gives 0.25 food. This one farm would not support a new town, but several of them would easily support expansion. The idea here is the same as with the workshop or the study, where in you get a small amount of the resource while still looking for resource locations to get much larger amounts.

Tweaking lore when it conflicts with valued mechanics makes sense, but it should have happened during the beta. But there was no real attention to lore-mechanics relationships back then, so all we can hope for is adequate ret-conning via the coming expansion/replacement.

Sir_Linque's basic point about current food mechanics feeling quite arbitrarily mechanical is a good one, and yet another reason (for me, anyway) to mourn the Inscrutable Decision to Ditch Essence. For a long while, essence was an exemplary bit of lore-based major mechanics. It didn't require lots of narrative stuff like who founded, begat, or conquered something or someone, but it was foundational, a big part of the story of the world itself. And it had the potential to be the standout aspect of the game, helping Elemental to achieve the best-in-show quality that the devs still aspire to. Nothing else in the early plans or current implementations was as truly innovative as that notion of a personal stat that was also a permanently expendable resource.

That idea with essence actualy sounds kinda cool... I wish I knew why SD ditched it. There might be a better way to achieve the effects they wanted and keep original essence idea.

In Civ3 Conquests you can irrigate deserts.I cant remember if you could in Civ3 vanilla and PTW, but if you cant, it is a simple enough change to do with the editor. I don't remember if you could irrigate deserts in Civ4.