[Suggestion] Simple growth model to get rid of pioneer banking

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... 

That would only solve the growth rate part of the exploit. The pioneer bank i use to prevent loss of growth ( from hitting the food cap) would still exist. 

I think a simpler solution would be to make the pioneer population cost take effect when they are built rather then when they are queued.

i prefer the current mechanic for growth, since it reflects reality - surplus food allows increased population (and economic...) growth.

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).

a rather crude solution would be to automatically set pioneer to the start of the queue (similar to how the continuous projects like "produce wealth" automatically sit at the end of the queue). that's not perfect, since the player may have valid reasons to queue the pioneer after certain other buildings.

or maybe only allow one pioneer in the queue, so you could still exploit it a bit, but not to the extent it's currently possible 

alternate solutions would be to have a production/research penalty for cities that have less population then their current level's capstone value. so your level 3 city works at full capacity if it has 100 or more pop, but if you "bank" 3 pioneers, it gets a penalty for being underpopulated. this isn't perfect either (the penalty would hurt the early game when you only have your capital - it would be at a penalty for most of the early game since you'll probably be building pioneers whenever you have enough pop for it)

or reduce growth to 0 if a pioneer is in the queue?

the most logical solution would be to reduce population when the pioneer finishes instead of when you queue them up

i'm not convinced a "solution" is really required, though. it's very obvious that the pioneer bank is an exploit, so if you want a fair game, don't use the exploit, and if you don't care, noone is harmed since it's a single player game. 

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.

+10!

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.

It was pointed out to Stardock almost as soon as they changed pioneer's to costing 30 population. I'm really puzzled that Stardock don't think it is worth fixing.

As others have said the solution is simply to make population only deducted when the pioneer is completed, plus also check that there is enough current population to build all queued pioneers before allowing the user to add another to the queue.

If deducting population at completion time is too hard (eg because it doesn't match how the other resources are deducted) then simply change it so that the growth and pop limit calculations take into account the population that is currently banked in queued pioneers. This way if you have 150 pop and queue 4 pioneers it would still show 30 pop (the way Stardock want it) but calculate growth as though there was 150 pop. To make this a bit more obvious they could make all the pop/growth tooltips show the population as being 30 + 120 queued.

It's a huge exploit that is easy to abuse and in fact you can't avoid abusing it to some degree unless you never build pioneers!

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.

There are a number of alternative suggestions here which may also solve the problem. However, I agree with the OP's suggestion, which is simpler and seems to solve a number of problems quite well.

More grain = faster growth (and sets the limit).

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.

To be honest I hadn't read the original suggestion properly. +0.5 per grain could work. +1 per grain is surely too fast, most of the time at the moment growth is +1; +1 per grain would double that even for a two grain site.

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?

If you use the pioneer bank you have a permanent +3 growth from food surplus alone in every city (except those with just 1 grain). +1 food per grain would match that growth rate for a 3/3/3 city (I figure that's the most popular starting spot for a city - unless you get really lucky and find a rare 2/3/4 spot).

With +1 growth per grain I'd probably even consider putting my capital in a 5/3/0 while playing empire as it will allow for a new pioneer every 6 turns as opposed to 10 with a 3/3/3 city. Really great for an early expansion and resource grab.

Ultimately, tying growth directly to grain yield makes picking city spots way more interesting and thus fun in my oppinion. With the current mechanic I only settle spots with 5-6 in material/essence total and 2-3 food. The rest is salted or get an outpost to grab any useful resources.

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.

Well- that's quite a big "If". That's not how the game designers intended the game to be played, is it? If we were aiming for the growth levels they had intended (without the exploit) then +0.5 per grain is much closer.

Personally I don't use the exploit (except to the extent that I build a pioneer if I'm at a population cap), and I don't have any problems beating the game on Ridiculous. I've not actually tried Insane yet, I'm planning to give Ridiculous a go with the new AI to see if the challenge goes up significantly first.

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...".

So here we have an obvious exploit and you suggest a fix to counter said exploit? Ehm.. no. Fix the exploit or just don't use it? Pioneers work fine atm, as you said consulates (lots of hammers) fixes growth options, as well as a ton of faction wonders, and wildlands heads. There are ways to counter "low growth" already in game, adding a completely new system in response to an exploit? No, do constructive things instead please

However, if you really want to tweak population cost, look at game speeds. I play Epic speeds, and I have 0 issues with population vs growth. (I have choices) Post your numbers and tell them to tweak it instead. 30 population on all speeds seems a bit silly, and if you could tweak it to 20 and 10 for faster speeds it will probably work wonders for most players.  

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.

Well, yes. Mods fixes everything *yay*. The point is, everyone asking for the default game changed and to boot add features, well that's not going to work. I'd rather they spend their time doing DLC's like the recent quest pack instead of making a bunch of features we don't need.

The key stat that needs tweaking here possibly, is the consulate building. 30 turns to regrow population on every speed is the problem, if that is not worth the hammers and time to build it on normal speed, yes then you have a point. Else? (back it up with stats preferably) No, it's a good choice atm, even if you don't play epic speed (you should ^^ )

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

So in this example it would be a pop 30 cost and 0 growth?

It would work for me, still think its worth it.

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.

This is exactly how CivIV does it, and it would suit LH too.

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.