I like the idea of the Pop cost, switching in back to a gold cost is a move backwards.

You know what I meant. Edited now.

Well the 30 population cost did not make much more sense lorewise since cities founded by settlers start at pop 1...

But I would rather focus on gameplay than lore. The current game has too many balance issues because of trying too much to stick to lore

Master of Magic took "population" away when you made a settler why are they changing it to gold? When a settlement of people move (nomads) there's population in that group and gold really plus a maint cost while they are looking for new territory to settle and I believe that was 2 food points not sure about the gold requirement but I do remember the food cost to the city they came from. Food in MOM also was related to gold income as each worker you turned to producing food brought more gold into the cities, each one you turned into a production worker increased production points. It was such a simple and easy method to use. Wonder why they didn't adopt it in this game?

Also making it a pure gold cost makes it even more easier to make a pioneer because even in the early game I can make tons of gold but my population doesn't grow very fast. The AI alone gives tons of gold in just greeting events. Usually around 80gp a pop. I don't even ask for it I just happen into their area and whammo "Hey we like you and would like to give you this X tribute thanks for being friendly". lol Too easy man too easy and this is on higher difficulties.

Yep and that was the reason they went for a 30 pop cost in 1.20, which worked pretty good. I think it was unintentionally changed back to gold cost. Derek can you confirm or at least give a reasoning on changing it tot gold cost.

Yeah but that might hurt the AI too much I guess and still make the wealthy trait OP.

Well I've heard stories about how the humaans beat the diety level of Civilization and it wasn't fair at all. They play on a SMALL map with ONE AI opponent and RUSH over and eliminate it before it has time to progress. TO me that's hardly beating the Diety level of difficulty.

Nope, until you have beaten DIETY with ALL AI OPPONENTS on the MAP at the same time then you haven't beaten it you've only EXPLOITED it. I've yet to see ANYONE who has done this and can PRODUCE RESULTS.

I've been back and forth on this.  It's a tough one.  These are the options (without getting into anything to fancy):

1. Pioneers return to their original costs.  This incents players to quickly produce and spread pioneers for a Pioneer Explorer strategy, which can be fun but I feel like it is an unbalanced decisions and players don't have the play in the single city model for long.

2. Increase the labor costs of pioneers.  This just slows things down, i tihnk this probably the worst option.

3. Gate Pioneers.  We could have pioneers unlocked with a later civics tech.  I've always been interested in this idea but I've never found a way that made it fun.  Instead you lose one of your early growth strategies.  You either ignore it and play as a 1 city game or feel forced ot rush to that tech every time because the civs that have it get such an advantage.

4. Pioneers cost Pop.  I like the idea of this solution the most.  But it comes with a really high cost, these kind of resource decisions are very hard for the AI to make, so the AI ends up running on the tightrope between being to conservative (and not expanding enough) or to aggressive and pop starving its cities.  So this becomes unworkable because of the Ai considerations (gating pioneers behind a tech is also a difficult mechanic for an ai that isnt hard coded to deal with).

5. Pioneers cost Gold.  This is our best compromise that ties pioneer creation to the economy, causes players to more carefully consider when they build them and is the easiest for the AI to deal with.

So that's the logic.  I can't say any fo the options are right or wrong.  But thats my thinking as I considered the issue.

Thanks a lot for clarifying Derek. I really liked option 4, but if it cripples the AI too much, it's a big nono in my book, unless Brad can come up with some magic to offset this. I really hope this can be made to work.

I guess the gold cost is the second best option. The AI seems to handle this pretty well in my current game, but (especially on harder difficulties) it really makes the wealthy trait the way to go. It's still better than having pioneers back to their original cost though.

I can't come up with better ideas. Was thinking about a fixed number of pioneers per city level to make food more important, but that's probably not fun and will be very difficult for the AI to handle.

I just think there should be more benefits to not spamming pioneers. City level ups should give more bonuses like production increase, more gold, etc.