That is a clever exploit!  Thanks for pointing it out to the devs.

 Still wish they would make an engineer unit for outposts and maybe let you spawn one pioneer unit for each level of your capital city...  6 cities should let you pick the right combo of town/fortress/conclaves for your play-style and not let you drown in city queue management.  

And you can always conquer more... 

The growth rate exploit is the main reason for using pioneer banking. Preventing population loss when hitting the food cap doesnt really happen until mid game unless you deliberately postpone food producing buildings (which is counter-productive if you use pioneer banking to grow your cities fast in the first place).

I doubt that is easily implemented since it would require an additional check to see if sufficient population is available upon construction. What would happen when that is not the case? Do you lose all production that went into training the pioneer? Is that queue blocked until population becomes available, etc.?

My main concern is that the current mechanic makes grain yield almost irrelevant when picking city spots. A city with 2 grains will grow just as fast as one with 6 grains and it only takes 1 town and a nature's bounty enchantment for a 2 grain city to reach level 4. The net effect is that it's always wasteful to pick city spots with more than 2-3 grain yield (even more so when considering wild grain / orchard resources).

If city growth was tied to grain yield instead of food production (e.g., +0.5 per grain)  then grain yield would become valuable again (since fast growing cities are an advantage especially in the early game) and the incentive to use the pioneer bank would be limited to avoiding population loss when reaching the food cap (which would be relevant for a lot less settlements compared to the current mechanic where it makes sense to bank pioneers in all settlements).

I am fine with the current mechanic as far as reflecting on surplus, i just feel that the effect is too weak. It takes too much food to shift growth between +1 to +3, so food is an afterthought and you look for other avenues for growth.

Only allowing one pioneer in the queue sounds like the simplest solution to me. It's not a perfect solution but I assume it would be a lot simpler to implement than having to check if you still have resources available when your queued unit reaches the front of the queue. Queuing up one pioneer is going to be a pretty marginal exploit.

Another idea: pioneer is the queue= no growth.

Another option: only allowed one pioneer per city, linked to that city.  Unrest increases when pioneers is being built or used.

From an implementation point of view I think the initial suggestion is the simplest. I assume that the code currently calculating growth already has access to the city stats of population, food per grain, and grain yield (since food per grain times grain yield is the maximum population the city can attain) . Changing the code to just use grain yield for population growth ought to be straight forward.

Personally, I'd like to see a population growth of 1 per grain. It's simple and it means the city's food output is the number of seasons it takes for the city to reach it's population cap - regardless of the actual grain yield of the city.

If such a change was implemented it'll probably be a good idea to revisit the town specific buildings (well, inn, festival and arena) and change the food percentage bonuses to straight grain yield bonuses (+1 to +4) thereby giving towns both a higher population cap and faster growth. It'll also make towns usefull for those 1/6/0 spots near forests that are otherwise rarely worth settling.

Hmmm... Would it be possible to have pioneers be produced by "food" somehow instead of materials? Sort of like what Alstein proposed but to have the growth rate of the city be the factor that decides the speed the settler unit is created? That way a town with high grain value and agricultural buildings would produce settlers quickly and industrial towns with low "food" value would produce them slowly. During the time the settler is constructed all growth stops as the food is turned into resources for the new city. Since growth doesn't seem to reflect people born as much as it represents groups of survivors joining your community, it makes sense that it would be a hard choice between letting more people join your town or sending people away to found a new colony.

Considering the post-apocalyptic setting of the game the food and population resources seem strangely unimportant. When I picked up the game I was sort of expecting there to be more of a borderlands focus. With a few larger towns relying on the vital support of many small agrarian and mining outposts, that must be defended in order for the entire population to survive and grow.

That way the small bands of soldiers running around the wilderness fending of monsters would make more sense, since the current invasion mechanics makes little sense in the setting. A handful of wildlings taking and razing a town of several hundred people? I could see them raiding a small village and pillaging the food stores though. And even if the empires and kingdoms despise each other people should be too valuable as a resource to risk outright war. What's the point of ruling if everyone is dead?

Also agree with OP. +1 growth per grain is easy to understand and difficult to exploit.

I welcome a change since food is currently not part of this game.

I posted something along similar lines in another thread just now, but I think that population growth should be more along the lines of 'I have this many people in my empire, this many more arriving/being born each turn, and this many industries, etc. to man', instead of 'build it and they will come'.

Using this model, you could build as many pioneers as you want (they wouldn't cost population), but upon establishing a city, 'x' number of people would be drawn from other cities to staff the new one, which might abandon some of your production buildings in the process.  Sure, you have a number of people being born and showing up at the door each turn, but this is a 'set' amount that is distributed between your cities (favoring the larger ones if they have room).

If you simply do not have the population to run everything, building a new city can actually cripple your empire to a degree, using such a model.  Sure, city spam isn't quite the same thing as pioneer spam, but banking population using pioneers is an exploit of sorts, even if it does tie up a build cue for a bit, and a silly one at that...

"Welcome to the empire, we need you to camp out in these tents for a bit, food will magically appear while you wait...".

Actually, I was being constructive with my response, if this was directed towards me.  The AI has been banking pioneers apparently, because it can.  So have players.  Just having a bunch of guys hanging around in tents waiting for some city to settle isn't costing food, which since food is tracked quite meticulously in cities doesn't fit the intent of the growth mechanic very well.

Plus, just because you like playing Epic doesn't mean everyone likes playing using the Epic time delays.  If the game is only balanced in one mode, but isn't in the others, well that needs to be addressed.  And some of us don't like playing for weeks at a time, and like to be able to wrap up a game in a shorter amount of time...

I have already envisioned another way to handle this, which ties in to building production, population levels, and growth bonuses.  The good news is that it is possible via modding, so if you like the current model you won't have to adopt the new one.  But for those that are annoyed by this, more options good!  I'll post up again once I get things up and running, assuming all goes well.

Simple, minimal side effects, and solves the problem entirely. This is good.

Not a great solution IMO but it would at least fix it.

My complaints with reducing growth to zero are that it isn't obvious (ie to people who haven't read the release notes, although at least there is a precedent in the Civ games of growth being diverted to production when building settlers) and more importantly it penalises use of the queue while rewarding and encouraging micro management (ie the optimum strategy when you want to build a pioneer is to wait until you finish your current building/unit, then remember to put the pioneer at the start of the queue - I'm hoping they will continue to reduce the need to micromanage in LH, not increase it!).

As I stated earlier in the thread I don't think it is that hard to fix the current mechanic, or failing that I'm also quite happy with a solution like the OP's.

Works for me. I still want an engineer unit that builds outposts. Spending 30 pop AND losing a few turns of growth just for an outpost means I play Pariden all the time.