The Monsters are supposed to be wrecking your outposts, but their aggressiveness is not turned on. Later in the beta we will have to defend our outposts.

I think you should at LEAST be able to garrison an outpost.

Once outposts become important to protect, it will be quite annoying to have a zillion units in guard mode, and have them be visible on the "Unit screen" to the left.

yeah all the above but i still think pioneers should cost much much more and takes a bit more time

the problem is if you lose  a pioneer in this game it means nothing at all

losing a settler/worker on civ was quite heavy like it should

Why should I use outposts instead of just placing a new city on the same spot?

Magog, in your next game give this a try.

1.  Find a good city starting spot, look for a 5/3 or better, preferably by a river (so you can build a Dock and maybe Water Wheel).

2.  Invest in major city-building research, try to get stuff to make yourself grow faster.

3.  Spread some outposts around to control resources and link to your major city.  More grain is especially good.

4.  Try to find or make an Administrator III hero and then park him in town.  If there is nobody handy then just pick some schlub and level them up for the purpose.

5.  Let your city grow to stage four before founding a new city.  If you are used to having a lot of cities this will seem to happen extremely fast.  What usually happens to me is I never found another city, instead I go to war with a neighbor and take theirs as my 2nd + cities.  if you do this don't be afraid to raze the crappy ones.

This style of building a Metropolis will develop a true monster of a main city for you.  Incredible research (comes from population, and yours is huge), cheap maintenance (one workshop etc, not six in six different cities), access to the very high end city bonuses (save your game before hitting L5 so you can view the options you might have never seen before) and a single point of failure that you need to defend.

If you haven't tried it yet, a summoner hero can be especially nice with this combo since they don't need early army units to be effective.  Summoner + Earth / Fire and another flavor of your choice is pretty strong.  You'll need to make a custom hero to get the Summoner option as none of the base ones start with that.  One game I had a summoner walking around with a L13+ Earth Elemental, that thing had something like 300 HP and made an incredible tank for me while my summoner nuked the enemy from safety.

- Manii Names

There is a military bonus to having outposts. Spells. All the spells that need your area to be cast. Those spells kill enemies by themselves.

Outposts could be more fun if they leveled like roads to expand their ZoC after several turns. Pioneers need to be cheap, the devs are hardlined about that. Remember, Attack and Defense is +25% in own ZoC. 

Garrisoned outposts would be really cool.

How is garrisoning an outpost different from just plunking some units on it and pressing 'Guard'?

It would clean up the GUI quite a bit.

I still think outposts are one of the untapped resources of this game. They could be incorporated MUCH better into the overall strategy of the game IMO if they had their own upgrades and faction/tech specific add-ons, etc. Would love to see them have more use then the "Zone Color blobbing" that currently goes on.

In my game last night I was trying to spam pioneers heavily, with only one city (which still wasn't growing very fast despite going heavy on econ, Agriculture, Mining, etc.), and getting outposts to all the resources ASAP.  I left a couple uncovered, though, and that sneaky Relias -- abusing our trade agreement -- snuck some pioneers into my territory and planted outposts deep inside my kingdom!

So now I am going to want to put down outposts EVERYWHERE to cover every single spot of territory.  Except then my (one) city is going to be tied up making nothing but pioneers for a very long time... unless I rush a lot, which costs gold I need for hiring heroes, especially given my low initial tax rate.

I suppose my point is that it's going to be pretty tedious if every game turns into a big initial phase of "paint the entire map with outposts, get every single resource ASAP."  At that point I might want an "auto-outpost" command, so I can just click once to order some pioneers to go somewhere and then build an outpost there....