I believe tha Frog knows of this problem (I don't know when it'll be fixed, but it is a rather 'big' problem)

Oh OK, so it is a bug and aware of it.  Awesome.  Will agree it is quite annoying especially when i find a nice 3grain, 3material, 3essence spot near some forest and a river but not quite in range yet LOL...

 EDIT:  oh not a bug?  lol 

Don't change it, it's fine.

Except that striving to please 100% of players in any discussion like this always ends in mediocrity, at best.  Please see WOM for examples.  

I'm indifferent to which way it goes, but pick one and optimize the game around it.  "Throw a toggle into the options" is a cop out.

the difference between those that start with forrests & rivers / those that don't is quite awsome - one could say nearly game breaking if factions are held to a small area (one city)

I believe the game really needs a setup for picking starting locations like we do for sov & faction creation:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/433646

I use logic: if one can build the town square against a wood or water source & then build onto it, then why can't one build a town square & study, then build on the wood or water resource - makes no since

It's absurd that a city can build up to water and is not allowed to make a pier. It's absurd that it can build toward a forest and not be allowed to make a lumber mill.

It's WAD, but it's bad design. It's not intuitive and it's not fun.

A player can get an advantage by turning on manual placement. Why is that such a bad thing? Every 4X game gives the player an advantage if they turn off automation. Why should this be any different?

You should have to make important decisions about where to place your cities.  I like having to make hard decisions like that, meaningful ones.

Which is a good idea.. but we are very limited with where we can place cities anyway. Its such an important decision they decided to remove 90% of the user choice for placement.

You can place your city ANYWHERE in this 5x5 fertile square that has one square touching a river and a forest ... choose wisely.

What they did with limited city placement + no snaking to rivers or forests is make this important decision already determined. Yay for no-brainer decisions.

They really should have left snaking in and had fertile land limit where you could snake to.

That being said I don't see them going back on this design decision now so we're stuck with it.

Yeah right, they changed it.  Snaking used to have at least six uses. In order of importance:

1) Dominion push (controlling territory, flipping outposts)

2) Fast travel (moving along a city costs no move)

3) Reaching far resource tiles, rivers and forests

4) Protecting developments (by including them in the city)

5) Blocking passes/landbridges/etc...

6) Producing esthetically pleasing cities, whatever your esthetics.

So the developers went, and totally and utterly removed one half of one sixth of the reasons to snake.

HURRAY! Snaking is dead, all rejoice!

Of course it's a strategically meaningful decision.  "Do I want the guaranteed extra production vs. extra gildar vs. extra food or do I want the flexibility of extra essence at the cost of less base strength."  That's nothing BUT a strategic decision.  It's all about how you plan to grow your empire vs. what your immediate needs are.  

My stance of this is.  "Thems are the rulez.  Thems are bad rulez."

I.e. I understand the rules, I can play effectively with those rules, but I still think that they are bad rules.

There's a satisfaction of getting the best city the rules allow, and I get this already.  But sometimes, I run against something that I did not know, that makes no sense, and it kills my thrill.  Very recently, I learned something I bet most of you do not know.

There's a limit of how far you can snake a city from its starting point.  It' ridiculously large, but I was building a landbridge and snaking a city along it, preparing an invasion route into Yithril, and not wanting to have to walk my troops around all the Kingdom units milling along the existing roads.

The city was LONG. I'll include a picture if I can find the save. 

So at some arbitrary point, I can't build anymore.  It seems that you can only go so far from the center.  Why?  Seriously, why? It's an arbitrary rule that makes no sense.  Same thing with the "Can't snake to a forest" rule. There have been dozens of THREADS about it.  Clearly a lot of people find it stupid and unintuitive.  Just as clearly, snaking is alive and well, and offer great advantages as it is.  Just let it offer one more advantage, one that people expect.

That said, I think it is a minor issue. 

When I play Civilization I prefer to play with my workers automated because it makes the game flow faster to me and the results they give are "good enough", but I don't have an issue that the game allows me to assign them all the jobs manually and others can choose to do this.

I don't want this feature because I want to do "dumb micromanagement" to squeak and advantage over the AI. I want this feature because if my city expands up to the edge of the water, I should be able to build a god damn pier. It just makes sense.

Every city in real life also builds towards the water, there are just too many benefits even if the main city hub is not on the water. They will come to regret this when the water level starts to rise but that's a ways away. I wish we could place docks on the ocean, I know we can't actually build boats but the economic principles are the same.