I don't really miss that to be honest. There are enough limiters on the troops you can make, between wages, resources, crowded production queues and prohibitive production times, that I don't really want to feel like Im actually killing my city to make them.

Plus, bottom line, the game at present pretty much requires you to crank out pioneers in order to claim resources and build roads where you want them, while at the same time requiring you to specialize your cities, so that only some of them are well suited for producing units (in other words, you cant share the load).

Until that changes, I think having to feel like you're actually hurting yourself to produce a pioneer is a little too harsh.

As Guanathor mentioned, units are deducted from city population. That said, I think it's daft that you can have ghost towns with full output. I personally think that each outpost, improvement, and building managed by a city should require x population to function at full efficiency and the population requirement should be totalled for each city. If they don't have enough population to meet that requirement then they get an output penalty.

Losing 3 population to build a Pioneer is so insignificant that hardly anyone notices.  You have enough population in your first city to build 10 Pioneers and found 10 new cities.  Does that not seem odd?  Three people start a new city?  Founding a new city should be momentous and costly.  As long as Pioneers do double duty of building outposts and cities I don't know how you can make building one more significant than the other.

I have played a bit with modding a "Lookout" unit that can only create outposts, while Pioneers can only found cities and cost 30 population and more production.  I can't get the darn things to show up in the unit list, and I don't know if the AI would use them properly.  That was my possible solution to creating outposts cheaper and not giving Pariden a huge advantage.  That doesn't prevent outposts from popping up in every unoccupied space on the map, but it may mean that Pioneers to build cities are not immediately on hand to plop down a city on every available space.  I kind of wish they would go back to using a trait or equipment to give the ability to build outposts or cities.  Then the cost could be properly assigned.

I also think that some tweaking of the ZoC and spacing values would help against the outpost spamming and resource stealing.  I've had the AI come into my territory and completely surround my city with outposts or build outposts on my roads between cities. City ZoC should be at least that of an outpost to start with and you should not be able to build an outpost within 3 spaces of another.  There are just a bit too many outposts.

For troops costing population, I am not suggesting anything as large as the population cost for pioneers, but the present cost isn't even noticeable (or documented in the tooltips)

For ghost towns, perhaps production could be calculated based on the minimum population for the city level.  So if a level 4 city drops below the level 4 requirements, its production is reduced to current population/level 4 city minimum pop.  I guess that should only affect production added from buildings, not the location values or a gutted large city could be worse than a new city.

I have found no evidence that level = more production, on the contrary I only see that production comes from base materials, spells and buildings.

I don't think its so important to over-importancify population, instead of setting a stamp of "Needs population" on every single item produced by the city, just find a really neat mechanic that makes it important, or leave it as it is.

If you want to have production based off population you should suggest some improvements to do this, be vary that these improvements will have a significant power if they approach 10% of populations = bonus production as was the last benefit, making materials pretty useless late-game compared to grain.

Another idea would get rid of the money generating buildings... again... to make population yet again important for gildar income.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I always hated the way population was implemented and seeing it go was a blessing. It never added a thing for me and took plenty away.

I really, really think that population should (slightly) increase research & production, much like I think it used to.  I want to feel like I'm getting something out of my huge-population late-game cities.

In MoM, when you built a pioneer, it would cost upkeep. Even when that pioneer built a new city, it was FIRST an outpost for several turns that still charged an upkeep. This mechanic helped prevent pioneer spamming as doing so could easily put you in the red.

Maybe something along those lines worth considering? If a pioneer had an upkeep of 3gp/turn, I sure would pay more attension to making sure I only had a few out at any one time.

Problem is that pioneers also built outposts in FE. That's gotta change, else I don't think we'll ever get away from pioneer spamming.

If powerful monsters were patrolling the zones around resources, you could spam all the pioneers you wanted, and you (or the ai) still couldnt expand until you had solved how to defeat the monster with army spam, leveled champion, or better tech, any of which will take time. Either your pioneer would be killed, or your outpost/city destroyed.

Right now in the game, they are dormant. I think you would see a huge difference if this one thing changed.  And it's much more fun to try and take down a monster, than to be taxed into inactivity.

I was just looking for that in the code, but wasn't able to find it

Could you please point me out where (in which file) to find that and/or what the function is called ? 

Well, if that's true, then frankly the game has bigger problems than pioneer cost. Im not interested in playing a game where the AI gets a free pass from monsters, or can't cast strategic spells effectively. I'm assuming these things are going to change. Simply taxing the player to suppress expansion to compensate for the fact the AI produces too many of them, but doesn't have to worry about the same monsters I do, doesn't sound very fun.

The AI must have some ability to combat monsters, though, at least in some auto resolve fashion. I see them with evidence of quest rewards.

But it's not a matter of turning up aggression, so much as bringing the monsters to life in order to patrol their zone. Right now, many of them are simply asleep. I build outposts right next to river slags, and they dont care.

This may all be moot, though. The notes for the new version said the AI will now build fewer pioneers and focus on building up their cities.

This is true, but with the addition of so many fixed +gildar buildings, taxes are rarely every much above Low, at least if you are just paying troop wages.  At this tax rate, population contributes very little to your overall income.  Heck, if you set your taxes to None, your population is doing nothing.  The down sides to increasing taxes just seem to outweigh the up sides for taxes.

I too sense the dangling of population.

Most games start out with taxes at none, and maybe bump it up to low at some point only to have to bump it back down to none after I start conquering cities. I actually still play trying to keep population high (I guess, carry over from previous builds where pop was all powerful) but my next game I expect to do much better by ignoring it, and probably ignoring towns too. I can get good money from city gold buildings, and I won't miss the tax revenue with no taxes nor will I really miss the city levels as they aren't powerful enough to be worth it and my towns are the only ones which really level anyways.

I think the fix is to make it much harder to get gold w/o large population towns.