Click on the fertile land, bottom left action bar will have a picture of a scroll and a hammer. Hammer should build the farm, or whatever depending on the resource you clicked on.

I'm seeing a trend here...  I bet this is going to be #1 on the FAQ for new players.

I appreciate trying something different but it's really counter-intuitive to people who've played CIV games.

Civ uses an extra unit to go out to the tile and build on it, that's not much different from just clicking on it and building instead. Neither case has you building on them from the city itself.

Frogboy mentioned they changed the GUI in the day0 update to a more intuitive way. I think this will include this "issue" here.

Good idea. Kind like in Sins.

The only way I knew how to build a farms was by watching the recent videos.  I recommend watching them as they're the only resource I've seen that sort of covers some basics (they skip over just about everything but if you watch closely you might get some ideas).  Until recently farms were built like any other buildings, so it wasn't as mysterious!

What's even more sexy is you'll probably play 3-4x before you realize new resources magically appear in your borders that you might notice that you improve the same way.  Or your influence expands and you get new stuff to improve.  You kinda have to manually investigate your cities periodically and hover over any suspicious looking landscape to figure out what you can improve most of the time.  I imagine you get used to it eventually but it's a little clunky in the beginning.

It would be nice to have a pop-up that said "Due to your research new resources have been discovered in your realm".  Instead of having to mouse over everything on every turn to see it there is something new.

Well it tells you in the description of the tech you picked with your breakthrough.

I still don't understand the devs irrationnal dislike for a good old-fashioned tutorial scenario with pop-ups explaining the basic mechanisms: "left-click on this!", "If x number is in red, that means you need more materials to build" and so on...

Sometimes, the old and tried methods are the best ones.

It goes down to the basic problem with the game's documentation. There really isnt any. This was a major FUBAR decision on SD's part. There are a lot of bugs in the game but having piss-poor documentation and an un-intuitive UI probably feeds into the whole unprofessional appearance to the release.

I too couldnt figure out for the life of me (until 1.05) how to make a farm; or that (or how) to equip my hero with a weapon to keep them from getting1-shotted at the start. These are basic, very basic things and they are NOT explained at all. The 35 page manual was waste of time, money and paper, they really needed (for a game like this) to have FAR better documentation. Sigh,, I remember the glory days of thick (somd spiral bound) manuals with games like CiV2, MOO/MOO2, or the Total war series with their tutorials. Hell, I found Europa Universalis and HOI with all their complexity to be better documented AND more intuitive than EWOM, which is decidedly less complex.   

RAT

The only issue with making it a part of the city screen is that how a resource is built depends on if it's within the city limits (it's surrounded by the wall). If it's a part of the city, it will take up space and use the city queue. If it's outside, it will use it's own queue independent of the city.

i got the construction of farms after a while; i had a click around everything in the first tutorial mission (though i wasted a lot of time trying to get the farmer npc to move there, thinking that was it.

but honestly, i know resources aren't within the city, but i don't see why that stops you from putting the option to build on them in the nearest city's improvements list.

does it?

It's because the game is drastically different than what it was as release. Agreed they need this for new players but they've been focused on stability recently such as memory and graphics crashes.

I recommend updating to patch 1.11 or even 1.19e so you have the most current version of the game.