I have to agree......the food tech in general gets kinda nuts WAY before you can even FATHOM getting a decent growth potential. 

There needs to be more ways to up faction prestige or growth directly IMO...that would:

1) Make the grain techs and civics in general a bit more strong

2) Make it even more powerful to concentrate on a few cities instead of spam (those few cities would level up even faster giving you good rewards)

I suggested in another thread that some of the current +x growth buildings should instead give +y*excess food growth. So, inn for example could give 0.5% of excess food in growth. If you have 200 extra food you would get +1 growth, if you have only 50 you would get +0.25 growth.

There should not be too many buildings which give this type of bonus, as otherwise city spamming will be too effective. Although in the beginning you will not have too much extra food available. In the early game this could actually limit growth somewhat. Founding cities would be a good tactic when you have enough +10 food per grain techs. In the late game new cities would get a kick-start because if you have 5 grain and 100 food per grain the city would get +2.5 growth from the inn alone.

Anyways, I agree something should be done to make food more important.

I think this depends on the world type you are playing...Try Swamp or desert

If you stay at just one city and specialize in prestige, you need lots of grain in the early game. People who expand quickly should be looking for materials. 

That said, +.25 Prestige per Grain would not go amiss. 

Grain is a long term payoff and Material is a short term payoff. It is a good balance IMO. If you are leveling a city correctly and teching in Civilization, you need food pretty constantly. Having only one city, I use up 5 grain in the early game. Keep in mind that grain gives food, which increases population. Population increases gold, research, production, and city level. 

I just finished a large map, challenging game and had been limited to 2 cities early-on due to quite a poor starting location. The faster city growth definitely helped.

I must be really missing the point here, sorry.

As far as I can see, Growth is the rate the border increases - not the population growth rate. Or have I got this completely wrong?

Grain has no bearing on Growth as such. So the civ techs that give growth have no bearing on how fast the population grows and so has no benefit on the tax rate etc until the city gets to its maximum population. If a city population increases at 1 per turn you have a good 100 turns at least before you need to look at increasing the population limit.

I'm unsure how to fix this, but the issue where it's more effective to spam cities everywhere than try to develop a small number to large size needs addressing. Also, exactly what is the growth mechanic and everything that goes into it? Game does not explain the rules behind it from what I can see.

Interesting about Prestige being divided by number of cities ... I like this

No. I meant I like that as the current mechanic

It was a compliment to the Devs

--> I think that this could be expanded upon somewhat, for further vertical development opportunity. Just not sure, other than national buildings, how to best implement it.

I wonder if the seeming excess food problem depends on your approach to the game. I tend to stick to just a few cities, or just one early on, and never thought excess food was an issue. I always want more. More prestige, more food, more growth. I guess I tend to fall into the "builder" camp. If wonder if this is an issue for the expander/war mongers, who never reach the pop cap (I'm constantly running into it, and trying to get past it).

I think the food mechanics are ok, not great but ok - it does a good job of limiting infinite city sprawl and removes much of the incentive to grab alot of AI cities, That said, I do think that if you have a food near a city it should give +1 growth to that one city. I'm also unclear about the tile yeilds when you are about to settle a new village - does the settlement use all tiles within your border or just the one tile you built on? I thought it would be all of them but when my village borders expand I don't see any change - tbh it's a little confusing.

I also think the economy model as a whole is pretty screwy - all the rest of the game is heading in the right direction and I can see big improvements across the betas which is really pleasing - however the economic model leaves me cold unfortunately. One thing they did in WoM was to have skilled citizens as a building requirement for buildings and soldiers, one of the benefits of that was it prevented spamming of low cost weak units. This was mentioned in another thread, but you can actually spam 2 units of weedy club guys a turn from each city and they have no maintenance. These units are incredibly weak and I tend to just use them to pad out my garrisons and in the early game but it seems silly churning out hordes of these kamikaze peasants when they are being drawn from small communities.

I refrain from doing it on any difficulty except ridiculous, where the AI has such huge starting bonuses that the free troops become necessary. Incidentally you could do something very similar with cheap fighters in Galciv2.

Sorry about drifting off topic from food to the wider economy btw