Building a City in Arabian Province

[mitsuko]

I know of at least 6 tiles where it's possible to build a city in Arabia. 4 are near Al-Qatif in Bahrain, 1 north of Medina, and 1 southeast of Al-Kufah in Iraq. Of course to get your Settler onto the tiles it requires being pushed by cultural border shenanigans. It would be quite easy near Al-Qatif if someone was determined to own this province. All you'd have to do is own Al-Qatif, put a Settler on the Oasis southwest of the city, and then gift the city to another civ with whom you don't have open borders. Hopefully you'd land on one of the 4 tiles that can be built on around that oasis. The other 2 tiles near Medina and Al-Kufah would be much more difficult to achieve, but would produce usable cities unlike near Al-Qatif where the city would be completely useless.

So has anyone ever done this before? It would be pretty funny if anyone has.

 

[Autumn Leaf]

Five years later ... I tried this and I can't see how it can work. Perhaps this exploit requires an older version?

The uncrossable-by-Settler/Workers "Desert" in SoI is not actually desert (TERRAIN_DESERT), which actually is crossable, it is TERRAIN_WASTELAND. Arabia is pretty much all Wasteland. The game puts teleported units on the nearest land that the units can potentially traverse. There are two isolated areas in Arabaia that you can teleport a Settler to, but both comprise salt flats, and you can't settle those.

A Settler on the Al-Qatif Oasis, for example (which, BTW, I can only place using the WB, which is why I suspect this exploit needs an older version), gets pushed 3W,6S and is marooned on a salt flat. There is no water available, and even if I WB in an Oasis or a section of River (and if I'm using the WB anyway then why don't I just turn that slat flat to a plain?), he can't build a city on the salt flat and he can't climb the adjacent hill.

I have spent a while trying to use border pops to e.g. found a Shangri-La in the little three-square inaccessible bit of Duggar embedded in the Himalayas, but so far without success.