Friendly cities stealing from fat cross?

[magicalsushi]

I swear this didn't happen in Vanilla...

Since I've started playing Warlords, I've noticed that when the fat crosses of two friendly cities overlap, some of the overlapped tiles will be greyed out and unusable in one of the cities, even if the other city is not using that tile. This is a bit frustrating. When my city's fat cross is overlapped by that of a city belonging to a rival civ, I can use all of the tiles so long as my cultural borders stretch that far.

In a recent game, Cyrus built several cities close to one of mine, so I used a Great Artist there. It took a while for them to flip to me, during which time my city could use all the tiles in its fat cross because of its huge cultural borders. As each city flipped to my culture, I lost tiles in the first city's fat cross, because the cities overlapping it became friendly. This was a little traumatic, as I'd developed that city quite strongly, thinking I'd have the choice to give it the overlapped tiles even after the other cities flipped to me.

I guess I haven't played many games, in either Warlords or Vanilla, and this is one of the first times I've controlled cities so close to each other. Maybe this did happen in Vanilla and I just never got into that situation.

So, my questions are: 1) has it always been like this in Civ IV, and 2) is there a reliable way to predict which city will get the overlapped tiles? One of the tiles (stone plains!) got stolen from my big, old city, by a tiny, new city that flipped to me, even though it was equidistant from both.

[Neoclast]

You can click on the tiles that are greyed out from the city you want to work them and they will light up and be workable for that city then.

[Ankh-f-n-Khonsu]

What Neoclast said. What you're seeing is a good thing, not the nuisance you're afraid of; you'll find you can move resources from city to city as needed, which is a bit micromanagerial, but helpful in many situations.

[magicalsushi]

Awesome! Thank you!