Food the most important factor in city location?

Quineloe said:

I don't know anything about Chicago except that the Bears play there, but generally speaking for Civ, suburbs are part of the city tile and I'm talking about what's around the cities.

You didn't really understand what I said.
In Civ, you build Trading posts OR farms outside your cities. If you build a trading post, there can't be a farm on that land. That really does not exist on our earth.

When I go away far enough from Chicago, I see the same thing I see here: Endless farmlands and fields. There are mega complex trading posts in the middle of nowhere, which is exactly why I'm calling a trading post that takes up the whole tile and doesn't allow any farm land "fiction".

Click to expand...

And you missed my point. A trading post does not represent a huge area totally dedicated to just trade. For example, you will notice that the grassland tile you just put that trading post on still generates food. It just doesn't generate AS MUCH as if you had put a farm there. And no,the suburbs are not included in the big city. I touched on this already, in the previous games trading posts were called cottages and eventually grew into towns. They represented small towns around the city, they had the exact same purpose as trading posts. Why they decided to represent them as trading posts now I will never know. A trading post ( as you have shown) is not a good representation of what they are going for ( its much too small a scale) and they would have been better sticking with cottages.

None of the game tiles scale very well, they are all abstractions. Do you seriously think a tile like a landmark, academy, manufactory etc take up several hundred miles? No of course not.

This game is all about abstracts, if you look at these things literally it would fall apart.