Food and gold in the capital

Hi guys,

I've started playing civ 5 last week, so i'm not that savy.

I played a couple of matches with my friends(they also started playing last week), and I noticed something that nor me, nor my friends understand.

Sometimes, we would reach 1500 ad(not specific to this, but wanted to say that game was played for some time). Reaching this age, we sometimes would still be with the same production on our capital tile as we were at the beggining of the game. Lets say that we started the capital on a tile with 2 food, 1 production and 2 gold, we would reach 1500 ad with the same 2 food, 1 production and 2 gold on out capital tile.

There were times when we managed to increase food and gold in the capital tile, we had even 10 gold(without gold age) but we don't know how we reached this. Tried to read about buildings and techs, but didn't got me anywhere.

Can you help me pls? Are there specific building to build in the capital, or specific tiles to work and improve, or techs to research? or some kind of combination of these.

FWY: I'm usually playing Japan, is there some kind of civilization setback?

Thank you,

some social policies add yields to the city plot
and maritime CS allies as well (food)

And some food buildings (e.g., granary, water mill, etc.) will show all or part of their yield on the city center tile.

I'm not seeing any indication of which of Vanilla / G&K / or BNW OP is playing.

Vanilla: Most important is all food increasing structures. And get really good at managing happiness as there are few tools to do so in Vanilla. (Along with a major gotcha to the Legalism policy that only applies to Vanilla as it was changed in G&K)

G&K: See the 4 city Tradition thread. This will get you early aquaducts in all 4 cities for free (sometimes faster than even your capital could have built one.) And the main happiness tool is pick one of the many religious beliefs that can be built in every city (along with the two in Tradition itself)

BNW: Actually the most important thing for food here is early sea cargo food routes (start at 8 food per turn! I expect a nerf of this in the first patch, so get it while its hot. ) And of course get Aqueducts (either have them free via Tradition or if you went some other policy build them yourself) Once the city has grown large enough to no longer need it you just reassign the route to do something else.

I was playing Vanilla, sry i didn't note that down.

So basically i have to build the food structures. I did build all those food structures, the only ones available for building were the military ones. Maybe it is some visual bug, I'll check this out in detail.

Anyways, thanks for help guys.