Mmmm animation references.. 

Surrounding the CC with fields is obviously gameplay inherited from AoE 2. It’s not realistic, but from a gameplay perspective it’s the safest way to protect your farms from enemy raids, especially in the early game, where your defensive capabilities are more limited. Of course, you can adapt the gameplay to your own preferences. Normally, it’s not recommended to advance to Town Phase before minute 8. You can even delay it until minute 9 or 10 depending on your strategy. Advancing to Town Phase requires a huge amount of wood and food that is usually better invested into increasing your population, constructing key buildings (barracks, stables, houses), and researching important economic technologies to gather resources faster. The larger your population, the faster your economy will grow. Ideally, you should aim to have 100 population by minute 7. A fairly common MP build order for civilizations with expensive houses (150 wood): As soon as the match starts: Constantly produce Civilians at the CC. Send the first 4 civilians to berries; the fifth civilian builds the Farmstead and then stays on berries as well (remember: 1 civilian per berry bush). One soldier builds a house near your chosen woodline. The remaining 3 soldiers build a Storehouse and start gathering wood. Every civilian produced from this point onward goes to chop wood at that Storehouse. Minute 2: Research wood gathering level 1. Build a house using 3 workers. Minute 3: Assign 3 woodcutters to build a barracks. Build another house using 3 workers. Start building fields gradually. Don’t place them all at once, expand them as you fill them up until you reach 5 fields. Alternate between building fields and building houses. Never stop building houses with those 3 civilians. As soon as the barracks is completed, start producing soldiers. Minute 6: Second barracks. Aim to have 30 workers on fields and 30 workers on wood. After the second barracks, you should already have those 30 workers on wood, allowing you to establish another woodline in a different forest. At that point, you should also begin assigning workers to gather stone and metal — 6 workers is a good starting number.

That does remind me that starting points do have roads around the civic center. Realistically, it doesn't do a crop field much good to have irrelevant commuters running through them, but it's pretty rare for an RTS to have a "irrelevant units decrease productivity" mechanic.  

It would mainly be in textures rather than with geometry. I'll see if I can make a thread for it.