Why am I unable to purchase a tile outside of my current cultural area?
Is there a way for me to select which tile my city expands to? In the example below, I would like to expand to the gold tile in the north east, but it looks like the city will take the highlighted tile in the south west.
In this case, I also can't buy the gold tile, I assume that is because it is out of my city's range. What must I do in order to secure the gold tile in this example?
Best Answer
As Jason said, you can't really direct the cultural expansion. It is not exactly random however. I haven't looked directly at the algorithm, but from my experience
- It will prioritize tiles which have resources over those that don't
- It will prioritize workable tiles over those that aren't (out of range, mountains/snow, etc)
- It will prioritize tiles with higher food/production/etc. values over lower.
You can't directly snag that tile, but if you have enough spare gold, you can influence it to try and select that tile for cultural expansion, essentially by buying up the ones it would select. In your case, if you bought up the 2 remaining deer and the salt, you probably have a decent shot at the gold getting selected. Your city is small enough that it might decide you have enough workable land headroom that it'll go for the resource. You might have to go as far as buying up all the other tiles, barring the tundra and maybe the marsh.
Failing that, grabbing at least the existing resources would both give your city a decent start at growth, and give you a head start to the culture growth finally reaching it. It doesn't look like there's a rival (at least not in the field of that screenshot) so you might have time, if you're not hurting for the happiness or a city-state quest.
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Why cant I buy certain tiles in Civ 6?
You can only purchase tiles that are directly workable by your city, which means only tiles that are within 3 tiles of your city. City cultural expansion can move beyond those tiles, but occurs randomly. You cannot direct it.How do you buy tiles in Civ 6?
Click on your city. On the bottom of the screen, it should say "Buy a Tile". Click it and buy the tile you want. There is an option in the city screen near the bottom where it will say "buy tile" or something like that and it will have a gold coin next to it.How do you buy tiles in Civ 5?
Note that you can only Purchase tiles up to 3 hexes away from the City Center.PUT APPLE CIDER VINEGAR ON YOUR FEET AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!
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Images: Meruyert Gonullu, Erik Mclean, Plato Terentev, Gotta Be Worth It