What is this pioneer spam people whine about? (v0.95 to 0.952)
1. The land is in shambles and 99% of it is ineligible for colonization. The limit on my city building is that I can't find a valid spot to build not the time it takes to spam pioneers.
This is because of your terrain setting when generating the world and pretty much always happens when you choose to generate desert worlds, and often when you choose ravaged, swamp, and balanced worlds. In balanced worlds some areas are usually good for pioneer spam while others are decidedly not.
Temperate and Mountainous worlds, however, are practically always pioneer-paradises, and anybody not pioneer spamming is at a significant disadvantage. (Not a crippling disadvantage when playing against the AI at the moment, mind you, but a significant one)
2. Population only gives gold, production and research comes from buildings. Spamming pioneers means I don't have buildings means I am hopelessly behind. (building a careful balance of a few pioneers and many buildings though...)
As you correctly guess, pioneer spam with just a few carefully chosen buildings until cities are established is the name of the game. And the more essence sites you find to build cities on early, the less buildings are required.
3. Building up 1 or a few cities makes you better positioned to conquer the AI's cities (the AI spam pioneers so he is WAY behind on the tech tree and lacks the resources to mount a proper defense of their juicy under-defended cities)
As a human player, however, you are not as incompetent as the AI. This means that you'll both spam pioneers and be more than ready to defend your own cities or attack enemy cities, though how you do this depends a lot on starting magic and sovereign.
... pioneers must first be used to build outposts which expand zone of control which expands (slowly over many turns) the "restored" lands in which a city can be built.
Again, this is a significant limitation only with some world settings, namely those in which the world starts severely inhospitable and even in those, well, pioneer spam is the way to claim resources and flip the terrain in the early game, something that helps you more than building buildings in general.
So long, that is, as you keep your capital and perhaps one other city building up as conclaves after you've started the pioneer program. Personally, I switch my capital from Pioneer spamming to building up as a conclave as soon as I've founded my third city. YMMV.
