[0.98 Bug] Placing Outpost Creates (?) Fertile Land

This really should not be happening, at least not so quickly. 

I can see the argument that after some time, the Empire/Kingdom's influence will heal the land.  I actually love it when a town of mine creates a fertile patch.  But with towns it happens after a long time and with a huge investment.  Outposts should not be able to do it, at least not without a few upgrades.

This happened to me a few times in 0.951. Never saw it yet in 0.98b, but obviously it still exists. I don't think this should be possible...

This happens by design.

The lore says that the supermage ultimate ruler of the world accidentally killed himself and destroyed everything when he messed up a super spell.

The land is like after volcano or a forest fire, its barren NOW but it CAN be recovered and it will happen naturally over time.

As a gameplay mechanic, ZoC allows your populace to work to recover the land. Vegetation also expands from healthy lands naturally over time to devastated lands and recover those as well, naturally.

You can accelerate the process by building outposts.

The main problems I see in the current implementation are:

1. Elemental Lords ZoC does the same even when it shouldn't. (some elemental lords should, but only some... and those should be agressive towards invaders)

2. Razing a city permanently ruins the land in the city's ZoC such that it CANNOT recover again. (this is by design)

3. Default map settings creates a lot of lush fertile land that does not need recovering. You can switch to desert or swamp map though to force you to create all fertile land yourself and stop settler spamming.

4. Recovery inside ZoC is instant instead of taking time.

5. The visual difference between burned out and recovered land is too subtle, it needs to be way more obvious.

This is confusing. Are you saying that creating tiles with yield is intentional? I've seen tile yields appearing and disappearing but it seemed random, so I couldn't report it because I didn't know how to reproduce it. If tile yields do in fact appear in healed land, then this should be better documented. They also seem to disappear if another city is settled a number of tiles away.

I don't think this is supposed to happen.

Yes

Agreed. Furthermore I think it should be made more visually obvious what land is "healed" and what isn't (very faint green hue in cloth map is the only clear way to see it so far)

Another "by design" issue. Cities cannot be built too close to each other. At a minimum city centers must be 8 tiles or further apart from each other. Building a city marks all tiles within 7 tiles of its center as ineligible for colonization and causes the yields to disappear from them.

It would be cool if you would get an pop-up like this:

"Greetings my Lord! I bring you great news! An area in our domain has become fertile enough for settlement! The people talk in excitment about going there and sing songs about the returning land. They await your command, my Lord."

Are we ready for terraforming yet Set a pioneer to work on land and dig ditches for the water to return. 10 turns later the land is fertile

This would be an excellant way to approach to pop-up land if it's meant to be there.

This thread either indicates a bug or a design feature.  If the former, it should be fixed.  If the latter, a pop-up like in Alfdaur's post would be an excellent idea for polish.

It would be nice to get word on which it was.  My gut feeling is that it's a feature but that, in this case, it's not working properly.  Placing an outpost shouldn't immediately heal the land.  

I really don't like this due to the unpredictability it gives to the game.
It becomes less of a strategy and more of a guessing game.. "If I pop down this outpost here, I MIGHT get a spot for a new city".

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Revitalized land is basically a random event. It could easily be tossed there as well...

I want to hear the song first.  Is it bawdy?

I've also seen the opposite.  Place an outpost on a fertile land and had several of the fertile land tiles disappear.

I have also seen this.

That, I THINK is a bug, I am not sure due to lack of documentation.

Given that the game mechanics themselves are still being designed, it would be very premature and illogical to have already developed a manual for them.

Although some clarity on the subject now wouldn't hurt.

You don't need a manual, you need in game descriptions and changing those whenever you make a change to the mechanics themselves.

Its not too difficult to do.

Fleshing out and finalizing in-game descriptions and tool-tips is usually part of the manual development process completed near the end of a game design life-cycle, as in this case, refining the mechanics and UI commonly closes a beta; the work of redoing these things actually consumes quite a bit of time.