No, I think it's intended to be able to build them only if you start a city near that spot. It doesn't have to do with city level.

Snaking does work -- I've recently begun using the strategy to settle on better starting tiles, and have been able to build both piers and logging camps using it.

Although if your city naturally expand toward a river or a forest, the choice to expand there will open up.

Is there requirement to build a well?

It can only be built in the 8 squares around your starting spot. So it is possible to snake to the 4 corners and be able to build them after not being able to at default, but you can't snake across the map for it.

It can only be build in a Town.

I can only think you must be mistaken. If you mean you built a building right above your city to open up the option on a forest that was connected to your city by touching the top corner, then yes, but snaking to a forest or having them pop into your borders does not happen.

I just wish the developers would finally see the light and remove the ridiculous restrictions on snaking to rivers and forests.  It's completely counter-intuitive, there almost no one who likes it, it's makings dozens of people asking questions.

Seriously, if your rules are so convoluted that old timers are confused about how exactly they work, as evidenced in at least four current threads, you should just change them.

I'm of the camp that a reasonable restriction would be nice. If the forest is within 2 tiles of your city center then you should be able to build on these tiles. At some point, I'm going to create a resource called dense forest where you can always build a logging camp for your city. Then this issue will be less of a problem as you can always build a logging camp when your city is next to a forest good and then you need this dense forest to build a logging camp.

You forget the 2 buttons for accept fight/quit game. Its weird how this game has all this features but half of them seem completely useless - of course they arent useless to the people who LOVE them, but to the people who want to play a computer game vs playing a fancy fantasy they are pretty useless

That's a solution that I'd go for in this case.

I think you can only snake if the forest/river is immediately diagonal. So, it's right next to you, but it won't let you build a pier or lumbercamp until you snake a bit.  I just find snaking to be stupid and gamey when it comes to movement.  People would snake cities into long roads so they could move huge distances without spending any movement points and it just seems very metagamey and hacky.  Like a flaw in game design exploited.  And you can still do that if you choose.  As for snaking to resources to trees and water, I don't care.

I'll add something to this topic....that's slightly off topic.

Since there is major concern that snaking can be abused by placing buildings out great distances, why not just implement some code restricting expanding the city past a tile until that tile is completely filled with buildings?

As is, each tile only requires two buildings, diagonal from eachother, before you are allowed to proceed onwards to the next tile. If this expansion were cut in half by requiring the tile to be filled first, the concerns against the concept of snaking would be cut in half aswell.

In fact, other than the extreme circumstance of adding a wonder to the city, snaking would be generally limited to the first two tiles away from a city hub.

IMO, being able to snake out to 16 tiles around your city shouldn't be that big of a deal.

Besides, those who play with autoplacement won't even notice the difference. Those that play with manual placement will be able to properly develop their available resources. But MOST importantly, the AI will stop building cities is such STUPID places, as they think they can snake their cities. This will make the AI more resiliant and will help balance the upcoming nurfs the AI will be receiving as the auto-complete bug is being fixed.

There are three important reasons for this, and one minor:

1) This mechanic makes city placement more important, and gives more varied options on what a good city spot can be (it's not a non-brainer where to place your city in every case). Choosing your city spot is strategy, snaking can hardly be called anything resembling strategy.

2) It's exploitive with snaking in the human hands compared to what the AI can understand.

3) Snaking makes extremely gamey movement bonuses when walking through cities.

4) The minor reason: snaking is unesthetical as hell.

I for one always play with auto-placing. Don't understand the fuzz about wanting exploitive gameplay and non-brainer choices regarding city placement. How do snaking make people feel they are smart and accomplish something clever?