@poot,
First of all, I absolutely agree that requirements aren't as transparent as they could be, and I find your post well stated and well reasoned.
However, I really wish you'd started a fresh post, instead of resurrecting that bit of infantile tantrum I had to wade through to get to your reply.
I read new posts too. I promise.
I think the real question is WHY you can't just build the building on a swamp land tile? The transparency is lacking, to be sure, but if you have land available that isn't too close to another city (another hidden limitation in the vanilla game), WHY wouldn't you be able to build whatever you wanted in the space available?
A similar issue is the minimum distance between two cities' new buildings. In my mods, I raised the minimum distance between cities such that two cities CAN'T lock each other out due to proximity.
That's the key point of this discussion. Either the limitations should be made known to the player through the game interface, or they should be resolved as limitations.
The same should be true for any buildings requiring specific land types (such as logging camp and pier tooltips). In your example of the alchemist building, by making this building and all normal buildilngs use all normal land types as valid, e.g. desert, swamp, etc.
Another non-transparency issue brought up in this post is destroyed buildings not being able to be rebuilt. Very counter intuitive if that's still true. I haven't tested it in any recent version though. I try not to destroy my own buildings.
My modding plate is full, but I'm betting if you identified the buildings in a separate post that didn't have all land types flagged as valid, it might even get noticed and fixed. Stranger things have happened.
