Seems to me he builds 1 outpost per natural resource in his "territory"... instead of finding out where to maximize the outposts.
Sincerely
~ Kongdej
It kind of looks like that, doesn't it? You can almost see a standard offset from the target resource being used as well.
I thought that they had implemented some hard limits on outpost proximity in this most recent beta build, but maybe I'm thinking of an upcoming build.