How do I work far-away tiles?

As you are well aware, when a city first starts out, its borders start out in a 3x3 grid. There are eight squares you can work.

As culture expands, the borders also expand. The first time the borders expand, the borders take the shape of what fans refer to as a "fat plus sign." It's basically like a 4x4 grid, except the corners are still outside your boundaries.

My cultural borders will continue to expand as culture increases, but the only problem is... although I can build improvements on the far-away tiles, I have no way of working them! When I enter the city screen, and try to click on tiles to work (shown via a white circle), I can only click on tiles that are within the "fat plus sign" cultural borders.

If I try to work a tile that's outside of the "fat plus sign" range, it just cancels out the city screen and returns me to the world map!

I can't even work the tiles that are in the corners of the 4x4 grid! Clicking on even THOSE tiles still cancels out the city screen!

Am I doing something wrong? Do I just not know the correct input to be able to hover over the workable tiles? Or is working those tiles just not possible at all?

You can't work tiles outside of your big fat cross. If you have a huge amount of unworkable tiles between your cities, you might want to consider settling your cities closer together. Overlap between city crosses is perfectly acceptable and will even prove to be cost effective, as maintenance costs for your empire will increase dramatically as you go up the harder difficulty levels.

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Is there any console command I can use to lock my cultural borders into place?

stebbinsd said:

Is there any console command I can use to lock my cultural borders into place?

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No. Cultural borders expand as the city's culture level rises.

Why would you want to limit the borders? The more area that you control the higher your score and the closer to a Domination victory, if you are going either of those routes. Also, movement inside your culture borders is easier than outside. If you are at war, you have the advantage in your own territory. If you are founding a new city and the territory that it will occupy with all or part of its BFC is already yours, you have a head start. You can build farms, mines, etc, there before the city is founded and get off to a running start. These are only a few of the reasons to want large culture borders. There are many others.

stebbinsd said:

The first time the borders expand, the borders take the shape of what fans refer to as a "fat plus sign." It's basically like a 4x4 grid, except the corners are still outside your boundaries.

Click to expand...

This is called the BFC (big fat cross).

When someone tosses out something like "BFC Copper" it means that the strategic resource copper is in a city's BFC. Mine, road, Axemen. Hell yeah.

stebbinsd said:

Is there any console command I can use to lock my cultural borders into place?

Click to expand...

no. but BUG mod allows you to place graphicall images of BFC if that troubles you

stebbinsd said:

Or is working those tiles just not possible at all?

Click to expand...

Found another city to work any good tiles outside your BFC. Or am I being too obvious here?

Nicol.Bolas said:

no. but BUG mod allows you to place graphicall images of BFC if that troubles you

Click to expand...

How do I do that? I think I've seen Quill18 - in his let's plays - use that feature, but I thought that was a mod.

BUG is a mod, used by a majority (probably) of players in the Civ4 forums. The dotmap is just one of its features. Once BUG is loaded, all you have to do is hit ALT-X to "enable dotmap" and your cursor becomes a shaded BFC that lets you see exactly what tiles will be workable by a city in any given tile.

TheMulattoMaker said:

BUG is a mod, used by a majority (probably) of players in the Civ4 forums. The dotmap is just one of its features. Once BUG is loaded, all you have to do is hit ALT-X to "enable dotmap" and your cursor becomes a shaded BFC that lets you see exactly what tiles will be workable by a city in any given tile.

Click to expand...

Where's the link?