Terrain and city improvements

I saw in the past several threads about taking away the worker unit from the game. I think that in Civ 4 it was ok, but if the developers will add new management features to Civ 5, the worker unit will become more tedious and replaceable. 

• Eliminate the worker unit and include new features to build improvements. The farms, mines, forts, towns and roads could be placed deliberately by the player (at a reasonable cost in money, time and shields), inner roads should develop themselves between towns and cities, national projects like canals or great walls should also placed deliberately but you have to build them first at the involved cities.
  

For the application of new concepts like altitude (Alpha Centauri terrain system) I found needed the renovation of the city radius concept.

• Eliminate the city radius as we have seen before in Civ series. Instead include a city range where we can build our farms, mines or towns. The city range could depend on culture and/or population.
  
• Expand the grid. With this feature we can add more real facts to the game. Cities began occuppying 1 x 1 spaces. Bigger cities (maybe randomly) should occupy more tiles. Units always should occupy 1 tile.
• With an expanded grid we could get city ranges from 20 x 20, and there should be no problem adding altitude features. However we will need largers maps and better editors.
  
• The extra spaces that the city expansion will occupy should act like towns (producing money and shields)
  
• Bring back colonies (improvements away from our city range). In this case maybe we could include a kind-of worker unit. For example, in the creation of national walls.
  
• Great Wall just should be an improved national wall.
• With the expansion of cities we should get metropolitan areas.
  
• Let the cities make buildings at the same time. Just distributing the shields between the buildings. 
  
• Let the buildings be available for the cities in terms of population. Very small cities should not be able to construct universities or public transport.
  
• Bring back food trading by creating a city trade management system. Just specifying the amount of food or resources between one city and another. In communist economies the resources should distribute uniformly. In free market economies the resources should distribute automatically but you can interfere and assign the resources by yourself (maybe creating some unhappiness).
  
• Include new improvements like, military post (or tower), walls or highways.
• An idea taken from the forums: make the bridges important for strategic warfare. The mobile units are not allowed to crossing rivers without bridges. 
• The units should be strategically located in military bases or posts rather than cities.
• Another idea taken from the forums: create a diplomatic border. You can occupy foreign borders with a military invasion. The foreign contry could declare you war or just accede your demands.
• An idea that I don't like from the forums: Bringing back the Zones of Control. I love the free unit movility at Civ 4, however, It should be a good idea if military towers and some special units affects other units passing beside you. Also I have in mind that if you are playing simultaneous turns you could be attacked in your turn by the AI.
• Building and unit creation maybe should cost a little amount of money to produce. This can add some realism to the game.
• With expanded cities it could be possible to create war within cities and partial ocupation (Stalingrad). Also, with military ocupation it could be posible to divide cities and create walls between (Berlin Wall).
  

I will add more ideas later, but I find that a change in the city radius system a must for more realistic games. However we should analize some impacts of these ideas like unit movement range and excesive micromanagement when creating a lot of terrain improvements.

After reading more threads from the forum I notice an unnecessary focus in Civ past versions. I don't think we should look at the past, instead we should look at the future for new features that make the game more enjoyable and realistic (as I said before).