Thank you for replying, although more questions arise from your answer.

What does essence have anything to do with then?

Are the yields from apiaries and wheat fields included in the original HUD yield, even though I am not able to use them yet?

And if every tile has a base yield, why am I not able to build anywhere?

Thank you, PW

Cities can have essence.  If they do, it requires the use of spell in your book to harness that essence, and give that city a specific bonus.  Some different bonuses are to research, grain, and production, but there are more.  The spells you can cast for this depend on the spellbooks and levels in them of your sovereign and champions.

Essence means flexibility.  It means that you can take a 3/3/2 city and turn it into a 3/5 or a 5/3.  And if you can get the scrying post building, that adds one essence, as well.  Building on a tile with essence is generally a very good thing, as long as your immediate neighbor isn't ten times your size and purchased its teeth from a firm selling Ginzu knives.

If you are looking to define where would be good to build and you believe you have a decent overview of the map then building along rivers seems to be a high priority for many people as it allows more gold and food building creation. Also, tile yields on fertile land near rivers tend to have good food (an example of this would be the pier which gives more food and +% gold generation). 

In conjunction with this, many people say it is best to build near a forest for the increased production and the ability to build more production increasing buildings (example would be logging camp etc.).

The production totals are listed on the screen when hovering over a tile, UNLESS something prevents them from being listed (this is a current bug I believe). An example of this would be a slag in the middle of a clearing, while you can see that some times have +3 grain, + 3 production, the tiles around the slag are blank. Once this monster is killed you can see the yields for those tiles if they indeed have yields. An additional example of this would be quest buildings, often these structures will hide the yields for that tile.

Quest buildings and monster dens do not always hide the yields. 

i'm sure this has come up in conversation before, but doesn't it seem counter intutive,that a settlement will have a higher grain or materials rating if the "wheat", "fruit groves", "clay" and "iron" are near a settlement, because your giving a boost to something you are already giving a boost to...

It just seems to me to want to keep those two systems seperate in order to give a more meaningful benefit to the world resouce tiles. I'm not trying to go backwards on any systems, but to give more meaning to it.

i mean that if i already have a city tile that has a higher food value because "wheat" or "fruit grove" is next to it, then i get even more food for harvesting that resource. How does that work then, i'm getting the bonus for the wheat and grove twice.

If i have a city that gets a materials bonus becaue clay or iron is near it....

oh well....

shrug...

upone rereading what you wrote, i believe the areas that get the increase are smaller than you think. I doubt more than two cities could get the bonus. stilll...

Perhaps there could be little iron doodads near the iron mine that shows the area that gets the bonus from it. It would also liven up the landscape etc etc.

The reasoning that follows here is suppose you travel a unoccupied land (similar to the US back in 1840's). There is a lot of open land and every so often you find natural food grain growing randomly in areas. These areas are great places for food and so you can have high yield. But these places are also under developed. They have so much more potential to give you a lot more food. Thus, you cultivate and optimize the farming giving you the most food for the potential of the land.

This is how the game mechanic works. The grain, material and essence is the potential of the land. When you upgrade things you are bringing that land to it's actual capabilities. Look at the farms in the US now. The midwest was full of great fertile land and now that it's cultivated, enough food is produced to feed the world 3-4 times over. But originally it was only enough to feed small towns and needed to be cultivated. There was a high potential yield of food, and it took time to make it produce at its full potential.

Similarly, these arguments can work for clay and iron. You can pick up iron on the surface and get a good amount of material when you are near an iron deposit. But if you dig deep in the mountain you can get a lot of iron to help with the production supplies in your city.

The lore is the reason why you cannot build cities everywhere. We talk about 2 2 0 being everywhere, but really this is not the case. The land was destroyed by a great cataclysm and there is a lot of place not suitable to live. I image something akin to a nuclear holocaust and there is just too much bad soil around. Every so often you find good soil in the land. This is where you can build your cities and have people thrive and not become contaminated with disease or worse.

The tile radius I see for this is really 1 space around the material itself, not a big radius. It is literally next to the material.

*Sorry for the long post.

This is speculation - the only one that can answer this is the developers, but this is my impression of how this is computed.

The land is created first and fertile tiles are randomly placed throughout. Say one of these tiles has an initial value of say 3 / 2 / 0. Then they add improvements on the land tiles. If a wheat field is plopped down next to this 3 / 2 / 0 tile, then the fertility of the 3 / 2 / 0, is re-calculated to make it a 4 / 2 / 0 instead. This, I believe, is the bonus described earlier.

Unfortunately we don't get to see what the tile score would have been without the wheat nearby and so we don't know exactly what kind of bonus the wheat tile is providing to the tiles.

This is the approach in logic that I would use if I had to program this random generator.

Of course the city only uses the initial value of grain to compute the food. All improvements increase food output based off this initial grain value, they do not increase the actual grain value itself.