I just had a playthrough where I got such an Insane food production, that I gained 1 person every turn, and had like 30/21... which gave no penalties?!
Also i could just simply buy out everything I built with population.. even a Wonder wasn't a problem whatsoever... 

If you focus on Industry you will just build it quickly.
If you focus on money you can just buy everything except wonders.

These three focus types seem very well balanced.

The malus from having lots of pops doing nothing is that they do nothing, it's really something to avoid.
Just build something, like districts or buildings.

The combo of high Food plus buy out with Pop is interesting, for sure.  If the extra people were just hanging around, not contributing, it would be sub-optimal.  It's the ability to use the extra bodies to rush-build that makes it a viable alternative to late-game Industry or Money.  And maybe that's okay, its three different ways to benefit from excess production of different yields, and probably slightly sub-optimal to a balance of each.  If it was clearly better than excessive investment in any other yield, I'd be concerned.  Hopefully the dev team gets enough data from the OpenDev to assess this.

There's a similar interplay in the early game, too, where using Pop to build armies lets your city re-grow those Pop faster.  But I think that's working okay, because this also diverts Industry and costs a stream of Money after the armies are built.

Food production have dimishing returns since the growth rate per food get lower and lower. Industry and money don't have the same dimishing returns and money also help you directly get fame stars, but so do food. Industry seems the weakest because money can do what industry does but more and have fame stars tied to it.

Have to agree, industry is certainly in a worse spot compared to the buyout powers of food and money. I'd rate it Money > Food > Industry

Laliloluhla wrote:

Have to agree, industry is certainly in a worse spot compared to the buyout powers of food and money. I'd rate it Money > Food > Industry

It is quite obvious, food have agarian stars, money have money stars and both can get builder stars as well directly, industry can only get the other stars indirectly which mean building stuff to produce food and money.

I've been trying to lose some weight recently; I agree.

Laliloluhla wrote:

Have to agree, industry is certainly in a worse spot compared to the buyout powers of food and money. I'd rate it Money > Food > Industry

Food has the limited power actually. The difference between 300 and 1000 industry or money is significant, while the difference between 300 and 1000 food is not so obvious cuz you still produce 1 pop per turn and you can't produce more than 1 pop per turn. Most of the districts costs -2 pop with sacrifice in mid game so you will never get agrarian stars doing it constantly.

So food is OP, gold is OP and Faith certainly is OP. Influence is a giant bottleneck, especially early on. What about industry and science?