Should I Settle on a Resource/Feature?

Choosing a proper location to settle cities is tough enough. Generally, it is a good idea to settle on a resource, especially your capital to be able to trade it immediately and get gold to use for expansion.

1. Settling a city will balance the tile to a minimum yield of 2 food / 1 production, even if there are no yields provided, like desert.
2. Always consider a Plains Hills tile that keeps extra production giving 2 food / 2 production to the city center.
3. Avoid settling on a tile with removable features like woods, rainforest, marsh – it will not provide any harvest or yield bonus to the city. Instead try to preserve the feature and harvest it later.
4. Settle geothermal feature and get science bonus.
5. It is not possible to settle Oasis.
6. Settling on a luxury or strategic resource is generally a good idea. It will provide immediate access to that resource and corresponding bonus yields such as gold (truffle, spices), culture (silk, amber), science (tea, mercury, iron), faith (dyes, tobacco), food (citrus, honey) and production (oil, coal)
7. Settle on featureless tiles (no woods, no rainforest, no marshes) with rice and cattle to get food bonus OR copper and maize to get gold bonus.
8. Getting yields from stone, wheat, sheep and deer depends on the presence of plains hills and features. Harvesting these resources provides more benefit in most cases, as features add tot he overall tile yield. 

Remember to consider the potential benefit from improvements or the impact of based on your selection of:

• Pantheons. If the Pantheon you select provides yields from resources (for example, Goddess of Festivals with culture to plantations or God of Craftsmen with production to improved strategic resources) then settling resources is not recommended.
• Eurekas. Consider improving the resource instead of settling it, if it provides a eureka boost to a science tech.
• Wonders. Consider wonders that have specific tile requirements, like Mahabodhi Temple requires woods and Great Zimbabwe requires cattle
• Districts. Harbors and Industrial Zones are the two districts that benefit from resources and improvements by receiving additional adjacency bonuses.

Example

All bonus, luxury and strategic resources retain their yields. The settled city center yield calculation comes from the resource’s initial values, the tile’s terrain type, and any features present. You only get additional yields if they exceed the default city center values of 2 food, 1 production, or 0 for gold, culture, and science.

For example, a grassland tile has 2 food by default.

• It has a marsh, which adds +1 food.
• It also has rice, adding another +1 food.
• TOTAL = 4 food.

If you settle on that tile, the marsh feature will be removed, reducing it by -1 food (from the marsh), but the bonus resource stays leaving you with 3 food. Since this exceeds the city center’s default 2 food, the game keeps the tile at 3 food. This results in a city center tile with 3 food and 1 production.

So if you settle 2 food / 1 production plains tile with wheat on it, the game technically keeps the wheat, but the total yield stays 2/1 because there is no food excess. As a tip, if you build a watermill then that city center yield will go up by 1, because it will increase food from wheat by 1.