Being able to build farms only on fertile land no longer makes sense

While I agree to a certain extent. My own opinion is that perhaps you are over thinking this abit.

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.

Ah, and I wondered what this "Revive Land" spell was for.

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)

To xStarfirex:

I don't know, I feel like small things such as this are in a big way responsible for the lack of immersion. These are the reasons the game feels like a game, not like a fantasy world that you expand your kingdom in.

To Wintersong:

Actually, I don't think the current system of ZoC changing automatically is a bad thing. From an aesthetic perspective, I feel it is really cool. Especially when you realize the potential it has. It's very cool that in Heavenfall's expendedfactions mod for instance one faction's ZoC turns into winter tiles, one's turn into desert and so on. To me it creates a very good fantasy vibe. I always loved in in Heroes of Might & Magic, how the different castle types were tied to different landscapes.

To Skyrar667:

Exactly, it used to be for making you possible to settle on corrupt land. That was a very integral part of what Elemental was supposed to be about back in the day. Now it only works just as Heavenfall said, obviously.

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.

Like I said I do agree with you to a certain extent. I would agree wholeheartedly if you could provide an example of a lore friendly system they could implement instead. I think they do badly need to bring the game world alive and I concur that there are alot of small changes could be easily made to aid in this. I myself think that removeing the adventure tech tree would be a change that would do alot to bring elemental alive.

I think perhaps one difference between you and me is that I am not that attached to much of the stated lore for elemental so far and as such if that "lore" starts getting in the way of their prefered gameplay mechanics then I would rather they changed the lore to fit over changing the game mechanics if they are working fine.

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.

It is a game mechanic... Sigh...love it , hate it or like I am be indifferent to it.  It is a fair limiter since all sides are limited the same by it. 

Could it have been done better?  probably.

Why did SD do it this way?  I have no frickin' idea...  SD will have to answer that one.

When I need more food, I use a spell, I research the food tech in the adventure tree, those also make no sense, but there they are the same for all sides.  It may be like... it makes no sense why a bishop in chess can move only diagonally, the answer is, it is a defined game mechanic.

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.

This reminds me of an odd thing with the civilization series.... in civ 2 you can build irrigation in desert tiles, but in later versions you cannot?? The weird thing about this is that in reality, of course you can build irrigation in the desert, many countries do it quite successfully, but somehow someone somewhere came along after civ 2 and decided to ignore reality and forbid it???

So if big name games like the civ series can get away with offending the reality of irrigation, why not Elemental?

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.

This makes me think there ought to be some (very expensive) terraforming spells that spawn resources. Fertilizing the land would then make sense.