What happened to Pioneers?

you can build on any resource in your towns area of control, click on said resource choose build option...

Thanks very much, I was beginning to think I'd broken my installation with a wee alt-tab crash.

That's not the issue, Pioneers before Beta4, could capture and build on resources out side of your kingdom and now they can't.

Why should I have to build a town just on get a single resource, every see an island with a single resource?

Who wants to build and manage 50 mini towns?

Not I. 50 is not enough. I want to build hundreds of mini-towns!

What's there to manage? Pay for pioneer and build town next to the resource you want. Then forget about it. It costs a bit more to claim a resource now, but that's about it.

Yes and no. Sometimes there are resources outside my influence but too close to another settlement, so a Pioneer can't build a new settlement.

I can see how it might be unreasonable to let them build resource camps on the other side of a continent from your territory, but it would be nice to have them able to claim a resource that's outside any influence zone but still too close to an existing settlement to found a new one. Nice at least until the neighbor with an eye on the same resource got ticked about your claim, anyway...

Why should I have to build a town to claim a resource?

If you build a town than you have to build troops to guard it.

Also towns have to be at 6 hexes apart, so to get some resources you will have to expand the town so it's zone of control covers the near by resources. Then it's building houses, farms, etc. to expand the town. Expanding towns is no longer as easy unless it's next to a food resource.

I liked the old way better, having Pioneers capture and build resources. If a Pioneer can build a town, why not a mill, farm, mine, etc.

With this change in Beta4 I'm afraid were going back to city spamming. You have to build cities close to any important resources. I thought this was exactly what was to be avoided in EWoM.

Also, it is actually quite annoying to have a lot of key reources just out of your control, the only way of getting them having to wait for your overall frontiers to expand.

Would be better with some flexibility where you can claim resources nearby, but e.g. paying for it in gold/resources depending on how far away they are (you would also have to defend them in no man's land of course). That way you could also attack other civ's resources and stop their expansion without having to attack the mainland in all out war (guerilla tactics).    

I don't mind town spamming, it's kinda logical that people working at resource would live nearby, hence small villages. That 6 hex limit does ruin that though.. some other way of claiming resources would be nice, agreed.

Imo especially any resources that are basically outside the kingdom's borders should really need guarding. Attacking/claiming them from another nation shouldn't even be an act of war

Maybe use caravans instead of pioneers, so the resource is literally shipped into town.

I don't mind it as is, but it would be nice to have some means of controlling border growth beyond building snake towns. I don't see city spam as a problem; given how quickly the cost to found new cities rises after town five I generally wait until someone else sticks a city nearby and then conquer it.

for some reason the player cant build cities on top of each other but the AI in my games has no problem plopping cities directly side by side (they actually touch each other at level 1 cities)