Yes please.

Agree. Scouts should not be able to make outpost - it would be too easy and too chip (presuming scout is not gone after making outpost).

Consulates appear late in game, way too late to justify costs of early expansion. Playing on high difficulties with dense monsters i find myself not building outposts anymore - cost is too much, and risk is too big. Especially if you are forced to leave some lairs unmolested for xp farms.

Consulates don't appear late in the game at all. It's the third rung in the cheapest of the three tech trees. You could choose not to research it in the early game but I don't why you would do that - the first half of the civ tree is filled with super cheap techs that are all about getting the power snowball rolling. I have always picked up roads to outposts as a fairly high priority tech (especially if I have Arcane Monoliths) and Consulates are on the way there.

As long as pop is supposed to be any kind of limitation then being able create a population generator without spending any pop on it would be a pretty comical game mechanic. I'd rush Consulates (you get +50% growth on the way too) then build a couple outposts right there at the city, no need to put them out in harm's way - they would just be free people factories after all.

First: I like roads to outposts regardless of whether I have arcane monoliths. Do you mean pop cost on outposts makes arcane monoliths overpowered? They were very powerful before by allowing roads to be created with mana. Unlike outposts they cannot be upgraded. You think they are overpowered now? Maybe you're right; I'm not sure yet.

Second: "Outposts should not stuck." I don't know what you are trying say there. I don't know what you are asking with growth being funny. It sounds like you are saying if I don't like free outposts I must hate all growth mechanics. That is not the case. I couldn't decipher this paragraph so I can't really speak to it.

Third: Consulates are not necessarily a must have if outposts cost pop to build. If outposts are free (in terms of pop) then they become a must have. It's a free lunch something that should never be in a strategy game because it's a no brainer.

Fourth: 30 pop isn't much. Whether the pioneer founds a city or creates an outpost the value of pop isn't great in the game currently so this is a pretty soft limitation to start with, making it cheaper would invalidate an already weak limitation. Once I've gotten a city to tier 2 I don't even care about it's pop; the levelup bonuses are nice but most of the value of a city is unlocked when you choose the tier 2 type. Having access to all of the special buildings in a Conclave/Fortress/Town is the bulk of the benefit to me.

Fifth: Outposts secure resources and reduce unrest by connecting city borders; they are mini cities and an important part of expansion (particularly with the new unrest penalty). The wording of the second half of this point isn't clear for me - I think you may be suggesting eliminating Consulates. I agree this solves the problem, but it solves it by taking away a choice and leaving us with less to think about and plan. I would prefer to avoid removing decisions/simplifying the game when practical. I don't think free outposts add anything to the game so I don't think it's worth removing something to get them.

Sixth: The warfare and magic trees are so much more expensive than the civ tree that this is not a valid comparison. Warfare vs Magic or some balance between is a real budgeting consideration but the early civ tree is too cheap and effective to just ignore until late game. Perhaps third rung civ doesn't seem like "early game" because we used to be able to spam pioneers carelessly. If the intent of the pioneer and unrest changes were to slow down expansion then I think it's fair to consider one of the cheapest techs in the game to be an early game tech. 

You seem to be saying the pop cost on outposts is too high because you don't get the tech that allows outposts to generate pop. You don't want to get the tech because you want to research something else. But isn't this a valid choice with benefits and costs for either course? It seems like a good thing.

The whole point of pop cost for pioneers is to slow the rate of building cities. Cities are so important because, yes, they produce pop, gold, research, production - and now we have to pay pop to create new cities. They are already tightly limited by available settle spots where outposts are not limited to settle spots. You are trying to say I should be against city improvements because they don't have various costs. They are city improvements. Cities are not free at all. It does make sense in these terms to move the pop cost from the outpost to the consulate itself. I have no idea if that's a practical solution. Charge the connected city X pop for building a consulate? This would work as a solution for me.

My case is that getting free pop from outposts without paying pop for them undermines the only reason for adding a pop cost to pioneers in the first place - to slow the rate of city building. Removing the pop cost from outposts isn't just decreasing their price it is changing the nature of the cost. If the cost were moved to the Consulate then there's no problem though.

Stacking...gotcha. You don't really need to stack it on a single city though. 1 Pioneer per turn from one city or 1 Pioneer every 6 turns from six different cities is just as good.

Paying 30 pop to gain 1 pop/turn is not abuse it's the current design. Should it be changed? Perhaps, but it is valid. Do I create an outpost/consulate putting me 1 pioneer behind now because I'll get more pop later? Production cost of pioneers are irrelevant. The value of a new city or outpost is too high to counter with production cost. No one wants to wait 30 turns (or whatever) for a pioneer to build even if it is worth it strategically.

I don't think that leveling cities is unimportant and I do like the bonuses but ticking 2 gives me the special buildings and most of what I'm ultimately going to gain from the city. I think all it would take to stop me from letting a village hit 2 then steal back all their pop into pioneers is if the upgrade chains like herbalist>apothecary>alchemist etc had level requirements on the structures and this applied across the board to all upgrade chains. It's a big change though.

I seem to have offended you. Able to make Pioneers carelessly = Pioneers use to be very cheap to produce not you have poor decision making skills. That's a wording issue and I apologize for any offense though I don't think you should have assumed I was trying to insult you.

I used the word expansion to describe empire expansion i.e. city spam. How are you spamming more cities now? Are there more settle spots now or did you just not settle on the available spots before? Do you like to only build a couple cities and secure all resources using outposts? Is this why you don't want to spend pop on outposts and why you're building more cities now?

Assuming military victory, it's just settle all spots till all spots are settled then start taking cities from the AI until victory screen, right? Any resources that are not connected cost outposts. You do have the choice of spending the required costs of hooking up resources now with an outpost or waiting until border expansion eventually hooks them up without the need for an outpost. That is another valid choice that we didn't have to make before because Pioneers were so inexpensive to produce.

There are a lot of old threads about this topic.  I think that if they were going to change it, they would have done so by now.  Then again, they do keep changing the cost of Pioneers.

There is a lot of old topics whether pioneers should cost population or not, but those topics, as far as i know, happened even before outpost were introduced to the game. I can be wrong though.

Maybe pioneers could build outposts over several turns (say, 5?), but not be consumed by the process?

I like it a lot - for now gold has basically no use

There are a lot of those, too, but there are a lot of threads suggesting a change to the way Outposts are made.  Some people have even made mods to add an Engineer unit that builds outposts and roads.  It's even discussed at length in current upcoming patch changelog thread.  There are many threads about Pioneers costing too much to just make an outpost, and there have been many solutions presented, none implemented.

One of the suggestions I made a couple months back was to make the outpost cost 1 of the Pioneer's 3 people.  So, a Pioneer unit could then make 3 outposts or 1 city (the Settle option would cost all 3, so if you made an outpost, you couldn't make a city with that same Pioneer).  I don't think this solution would be implemented, though, because it would probably be a lot to code.

In another thread, one of the solutions I liked was to change the Settle action to cost 30 population, and the Outpost action to cost something else (maybe 30 gold).  I posted that idea in the changelog thread, but I stole it from another thread.  There are a lot of threads.