Pioneers should remain cheap or else Arcane Monolith will be way overpowered. Arcane Monolith is already a huge advantage. Playing Pariden I only build pioneers to build cities and steal all the AIs Shards with Arcane Monolith.

Arcane Monolith isn't a "huge advantage", it is a Biblically overpowered spell. The fact that it can be cast at range to any place you have ever seen before... Sheesh. Heck, you can even USE it to explore if you want to spend the mana. It needs to cost way more than it does AND have a range limitation.

I like the idea of Cities being more of a ZoC producer and Outposts becoming defensive things more than Zerg Rush Expansion enablers.

IMO, Pioneers should cost more.  The mad rush land grab early game is not fun.  The best part of this game is the initial exploration and conquering of the wilds.  I find that with .913, the AI is more prepared for the monsters, and so the map gets stripped of all the fun stuff like treasure and quests in nothing flat and AI cities and outposts pop up like suburban residential developments.  More expensive pioneers would mean less pioneers built = slower urbanization.

The same could also be said for Pariden's nifty new spell the Arcane Monoloth (?) that creates an outpost.  I played as Pariden and completely spammed outposts on any resource that wasn't nailed down.  Considering that this spell helps you claim shards that help you get mana faster that helps you cast this spell more often, it should cost more mana to prevent shameless Paridens from spamming outposts.  I quickly had over 2K mana and had just about every unit I owned buffed to the max.  Maybe that is the desired effect.

Last, and not really all that related, the idea of city improvements that have benefits that scale with city size is a great idea.  Especially on bonuses that are not directly affected by population, like research and gildar (and maybe even some of those too).  A bonus of X * CityLevel would make a level 4 city equal to 4 level 1 cities with the same improvement.  OC, maybe the cost to build should scale too, so that if you build it early it costs less and then grows with the city, but if you build it late it costs more to get the multiplied bonus.  This kind of thing might make larger cities more of an option.

This, this and this. 

Maybe make:

     ZoC 1 tile

     Can be destroyed by anyone with or without war.

     Cost more with each cast

     Increased upkeep per existing monolith, Or limit the times it can be cast through out the game.

Roads:

     Return to the builders unit?

     Several turns to construct one tile of road... dependent on terrain.

     Faster roads with the more "man hours" invested.... IE larger builder units, or more of them, tech....

Outpost battles:

     Anyone remember those old Nintendo games of  "historical accuracy"? Some of those battles rocked because of the obstacles like Walls and Gates.

It really needs to be something to the tune of 1 upkeep on top of 20-30 mana for the cast, and limited to 1 casting per turn. That puts it at a time cost of approximately 10-15 turns, which is roughly equal to the early game time cost of a pioneer, plus the benefit of not using the production queue.

As an alternate to the "once per turn", if it were capped at 1 monolith plus 1 per shard controlled, it would make it largely a shard acquisition device, yielding a net 1 mana per turn for the caster, and helping further identify Pariden as a magic-focused nation.

I'm torn on the 1 ZoC thing, since having 2 ZoC does help limit encouragement of Pioneer spam, but it also devalues cities.

It is hard enough to keep your outposts as is, though. I would not like to see them as something you could break without declaring war. Otherwise the AI would break them just because they could. Heck, I know I would. Every time.

Kudos for pointing this out.  

Good point.

Do it like other games.

Cities should have administration costs. You should need to keep them happy. If they aren't happy, (say high unrest), they rebel.  A rebelling city could turn into a monster lair that fires off rebel troops of the appropriate type.

Pioneers should cost WAY (like, totally) more resources to train.  They should also have some sort of wage.  They should also be designable, like any other unit.

EDIT: And no discussion of game mechanics is ever useless or pointless.  That's (partially) why these forums exist, to discuss game issues.