Hey everyone, new to the forums so this may have been covered before. Currently playing a game and I noticed that when you queue a pioneer to build, it takes away the required 30 population from your total. This brings your population down therefore increasing food surplus and growth rate.

Now I realize this is a small, maybe negligible gain (and somewhat annoying to micromanage), but the increase seems to not be intended in game mechanics. For example, I have a level 1 city with 38 population, surplus food is 263%, and growth rate is +2. I am building a bell tower (or any other building), I then queue a pioneer, 30 population is removed from city, and growth rate increases to +3 with a food surplus of 1250%. I can keep a pioneer in the queue indefinitely and have a permanent +1 growth bonus early game. I can cancel the pioneer from the build queue whenever the city would be able to level up from population. So, referring to the previous example, once my population hits 20, cancel the pioneer from queue (while still building whatever other buildings in the meantime) and level the city.

I could even see this working later in the game by stacking pioneers in the queue to keep population low enough even with grain/growth improvements. Will have to test it as I go, but this does seem pretty imbalanced as I basically have a half strength Sovereign's Call at my disposal and possibly more at higher city levels if I keep population as close to 0 as possible. 

Am I missing something here? Does population impact anything else like tax income or unit production? The only downside or reason this would not work is if you wanted to produce the pioneer, therefore actually losing the reserved population instead of basically "putting it on credit".