Yes, and it's the research that is the main problem. You need cheaper upgrades for research in cities, and some kind of better pop scaling to mitigate or something. Study etc. is too expensive early game, and a new city will get the research up quicker, and adds more production to boot.

I would also like that new settlement sites were camped by monsters, so you had to have a minimum army to clean them up first or something, before you could settle. (maybe implement a blocking thingie from monsters similar to cities etc. so you had to clean them away first)

that's survival of the luckiest, not fittest

there's lots of room for improvement in FE

Ecomental 

Ecomental also adds many more fertile squares in general, and many with essence, so there is a lot more area to settle on, which allows the AI to settle easier and less likely to be hemmed in or in a bad area that stunts their early growth and certain eventual demise.   That said, it changes game play a lot, and sometimes I almost feel like there might be too many areas to settle on as I don't like city spam or infinite city sprawl.  I do try to limit my city expansion and prefer to use outposts after a certain point, and don't get too upset if the AI takes that resource nearby that I was a bit too slow getting to on my own. 

Ecomental mod:  https://forums.elementalgame.com/433981

Would you like a mod for this? In my mod all cities generates 2% empire wide unrest, with certain buildings negating part or all of that (can be easily adapted to townhalls, palace, and towers of dominion). Basically, it means that you need to keep your unrest under control while expanding or it'll slow down your empire overall (research/production wise). Unfortunately, in general, the AIs just don't handle unrest control nearly as well in vanilla from my trial runs (that's why it's only at 2%), so you'll have to turn up the difficulty to give them an edge. It's a relatively minor change in the grand scheme of things, but it does slow down the steam roller somewhat.

As for the core game, I don't think what you want will happen. I argued against cheap pioneers (and no wage cost) for a bit during beta, but because the AI can't protect their pioneers, it became very easy to cripple the AI if they were high value and irreplaceable (losing one to monster after 20+ turns of production was a deathblow, that's not to mention that players can hunt them down). High value pioneers also made the outpost mechanic very tricky, the AI doesn't choose the best of spots to put these up (to maximize possible benefits), and wasting production points like that was very crippling (sometimes it just isn't worth it to built an outpost at all). As a combine result, you get cheap pioneers that you can spam endlessly without worry (and then disband to grow cities) and more limited settlement spots.

To be honest I don't really pioneer spam all that much anymore, and I still do well up to hard difficulty (anything above and I'd have to resort to cheese tactics). It's just one of the many OP tactics in the game. It definitely works, but there are others just as powerful.

One man's luck is another man's skill... 

Rather than building lots of Studies to get my research off to a flying start, I tend to instead go for the Inspiration enchantment.  It's only +1 research, but for early cities that's a big boost, and it frees them up to get pioneers out there, crank some early military, and so on.  And for each new settlement that has at least 1 essence, Iu can cram another one of those in there.

Granted, I'm still getting the usual reductions due to Unrest.  But it's better than waiting for those Studies to be done.

Then, if I'm playing as Enchanters, I get those scrying pools built and beeline to Arcane Mastery as soon as possible.  This nets me the Revelation enchantment which is +1 Research per essence.  If I've been building on sites with at least one essence (and with Ecomental, why wouldn't you?) the scrying pool gets me one extra essence which makes it worth casting even if my city has a Study or a School by now.

The Oracle improvement for Conclaves gets me a further +1 essence, which then means another +1 Research (this updates when you hit End Turn).

But I would tend to agree that the Study needs to be cheaper.

Personally... when I play pariden (which is pretty much always) I start with a sovreign that does not know inspiration, and in a magic sparse and resource sparse desert world (so I often have to build settlements which have no essences, because there are none in that region of tiles).

Well, outposts costing the same as a settlement is stupid imo. (a settlement is far more worth it than an outpost) Maybe they should remove the outpost thingie from pioneers, and let sovereigns and governor champions be able to found them instead with maybe a CD? Would make more sense, and make you able to tweak pioneer costs a bit.

Good point - kind of like the pioneer/explorer and settler concept.    Current pioneers (maybe slightly cheaper) for outposts, and I still like this idea for settlers.  

Each city ALWAYS has people that want to migrate, so there is ALWAYS a non-rushable pioneer building that is worth X (say 20) pop. 

  Once completed it becomes a stationed unit. 

  Each city can only have 1 active at a time and production of the next does not commence while the pioneer is active.

  Pioneer production does not affect city production, its essentially a separate function

  Pioneers can be consumed by another (or the same) city to increase population

So there would be constant steady expansion for all civs, the further you are expanding the longer before you can build another.

Possibly have techs (path of governor) that modify this slow/speed up, etc - expansionist as a sov trait, etc

Also adds options for getting that key city to level 5 - do not expand to more cities, grow existing ones - specifically say you are fighting 2 fronts, clear one up and have a fortress on the other front you can attempt to level it up with pioneers from the other front.

building outposts with scouts sounds nice, agreed.