Building a city makes the land more valuable. If you tell people that you plan to invest a ton of money into the area they will include that information in their calculations when you are trying to buy their land. Some will then only sell their land for skyhigh prices, and some won’t sell at all in the hopes that they can sell it for even more once the city has been built around them. This can strangle the project in its infancy.

> If you want to join a community, you can just, like, go join it.

Yeah and that works perfectly well if you want to buy a single farm. You negotiate with the seller, you do the contract stuff, you pay, you move in. All good. But that is not what they plan.

It is almost as if you haven’t thought about why they do what they do at all.