Ideas on how to balance 1 pop requirement Settlers

[Predator145]

Is there anyway to make 1 pop requirement settlers not broken for expansionist civs? It is an insanely strong bonus in the hands of the human. It's pretty good in the hands of the AI as it's likely to be 3 cities ahead of a standard civ, but not broken since that's all the Exp trait does. I tried making Exp settlers cost 24 shields. But it didn't benefit the AI much since they'd often not have the growth needed to get the settler out sooner to take advantage of that discount. So they end up founding the same amount of cities as a regular civ.

Perhaps the settlers could cost more shields? Spoonwood gave the brilliant idea to balance out Agricultural civs with 40 shield settlers and it worked well. But this also means that a civ with both the Ag and Exp trait now would have to build 50 shield settlers that only cost 1 pop. The AI maybe be happiness or size 6 pop capped from that since it likes building stuff between the settlers.