How is MERMAIDS's Special Landscapes work?

[edwardcheng26]

By definantion, The Coral Reef must be placed on a River space that is directly adjacent to a Mermaid Structure. It does not prevent other players
from using that River space for expansion or indirect adjacency. Shipping works with the Coral Reef as with any other Structure.

• Unless stated otherwise, the special landscape may be placed during the Action phase instead of a regular
Terrain tile when transforming Terrain into your Home Terrain.
• The special landscape is considered a Structure with a Power value of 1:
• It counts towards forming a Town.
• It counts towards the Area Scoring and the Final Scoring tiles.
• Unless stated otherwise, the special landscape is not considered any of the existing types of Structures.
Especially, it is not considered a Dwelling and, therefore, any tiles providing Victory points for Dwellings (or
any other Structure for that matter) do not provide any for the special landscape.

https://ibb.co/1JrYQv9
Initially i thought the coral reef is count 1 power and a connected space to the town, but it didn't form a town

https://ibb.co/YZx8GpM
then i build a bridge, and still not form a town

https://ibb.co/5F4WZLM
until i upgrade the trading house to form a town, so what is the point to build coral reef, it didn't treat as a part of the town or 1 power, which is against the rule, is this a bug or what?

[Krijner1]

No bug.

When forming a town, the special landscape and the town tile need to be put on the same hex. I thought this was stated in the tooltips as well? Don't see it in your list, so I get where you would get confused. You cant cross 2 water tiles with this ability + landscape combination but the power of the landscape counts towards the town total.

In your first two examples your buildings are not connected, the town tile would be placed on the landscape tile leaving two separate towns of 4 and 3 power strength. The bridges changes nothing here.

If you would have put your landscape on the water tile between between f2 and e4, it would have been a town in the second example with the bridge. Not in the first example without bridge though, because you would still lack connection.

In your third example it is possible to form a town without the landscape, so normal mermaid rules apply and you are able to connect with the town tile.

In your case, indeed as you concluded, the landscape was not used forming the town. It should have counted for area scoring though, so I hope it was not completely useless for you.