AI doesn't plan city growth. Human player can rush his city to 2 level and then quickly produce 2 pioneers. Human player wisely casts spells which increase food and growth of a city. Human player settles on the best tiles. So AI should have his own "knowledge" of how to survive against wise human player.

Why not set a prereq to prevent the AI from building pioneers until the city is level 2. That would mean the AI will never create pioneers from a city level of 1. I think that would be a good mod for this as well.

But to make a unit that only builds outposts seems a little unnecessary at the moment.

I make several outposts as it is now. There are plenty of times when I reach population max on some of my cities and so I just build a pioneer instead of leaving it maxed out. There are some cities that have a growth of 5, and so 6 turns population is recouped...don't really see the disregard to pioneers costing 30 pop to build an outpost.

Better have one type of pioneers, the ones we have today, with the same cost. Give them the road building ability and remove automatically generated roads from the trade tech. They could also build the outposts without being lost afterwards, but it should take at least 10 turns, where they had to be defended from monsters potentially. Make some rules for max distance from outposts to avoid spamming, and allow outposts to be turned into fortresses that can hold a garnison if the pioneer improves it another 20 turns. This worker action should also cost abit of money (100-200G), so it was a hard decission to make.

This way pioneers would have an increased importance, and also more strategical flavour. Do I build that city at once, or use my pioneer for some road/outpost building first? Do I have the troops availble protecting my pioneer workers, or should I use my troops for exploring, quests or clearing nests?

With more naval stuff introduced in the game pioneers could also be expanded on With more abilities, like building harbours at the coast, and Connect them to cities via road for instance. They could also potentially be turned into Fishing boats when entering the sea, and then be used to harvest sea ressources. Endless possibilities here.

These ideas would really improve the game when it comes to building up your empire, and add alot more planning and strategy. Harder decissions to ne made every turn. My hopes goes for an expansion pack bringing us this + naval stuff. The huge kind of expansion pack improving on the huge potential this game still has. 

Great idea! This would surely help AI. But technically there could be a problem. There are 3 type of cities of 2 level. What <prereq></prereq> should the unit use? This will need some testing, but the idea is right.

I like some ideas, they also need testing and now I don't know if they are possible.

The idea of auto-roads imho is a great help to AI. Yes, human player loses some creativity in gameplay with all roads that are created automatically. But being a great help to AI auto-roads are the great feature of the game. If it were possible to allow auto-roads only to AI and human player would need to build roads manually - this would be brilliant, but I don't know if this is possible.

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i like the idea of outposts being built by a different unit than settlers.  Perhaps a military unit?