I just don't see the point of this feature. It doesn't make any sense at all (I have yet to see any snake shaped city irl), creates user fatigue for little benefit, and produces cheesy gamey effects (like army teleportation, mines in city walls...). It is especially bothersome when you try to raze improvements, which happens a lot after you conquer computer cities, as the AI seems to fail to understand why building everything is a bad idea (although I can relate to that, it is horribly boring to have most cities not produce anything for the whole game).

I know the feature has already been coded, but as it makes the game less interesting, and more cumbersome to play, I see little benefit to keep it. It's not like the development hours spent on this features had not already been wasted anyway.

The only "problem" would be watermill and lumbermill placement, but a simple check to see wether there is a forest or water tile less than 4 (or 6 or whatever) tiles away for a city would do just fine, and remove this cumbersome feature from the game. We could still have a city view screen with all the building lined up, as in Civ1, which is cool, it is just that I fail to see the benefit of multi tiles cities : they are a slight annoyance at best.