Reference lists for cities/techs ?

There's no precise guide for the points because the points gets scaled with map setting and game pacing.

The tech tree... is always shown in the tech screen. I'm not sure what else you could want from it?

The buildings available is complicated because there are 4 different "sets" (outpost, town, fortress, conclave) of buildings. You can see most of them just by opening up the build menu on the appropriate type...

Outposts has all the basic building,

Town has the basic buildings + Market, Grocer, and Growth lines of buildings, + Missionary Hall

Fortress has the basic buildings + Forge and Training lines of buildings, + Walls

Conclave has the basic buildings + Herbalist and Sage lines of buildings

There's a base cost anyway. Like, say, Bell Tower costs 128 production points. When you select a unit, you see its current cost in the bottom summary. When you select a building you see... the current city statistics in the same area. So the only thing you can figure out is how long it takes - at your current settings of tax and your building sets and inter-city boni, etc - to build.

The same. Cost in research points of each technology. You only have "how long will it take to finish this" estimates, which includes learning everything before it, and assumes that nothing changes. Not that Civics costs 12pt.

I can find that information. I have to delve into the install directory, open up the data file, submit my poor eyes to the eyesore that is XML. And then alt-tab back into the game. What I was hoping is to get that information in-game.
 

You forgot the buildings linked to ressources, by the way. And the faction-only buildings.

Sure, there's a lot of buildings. Ok, where's the help screen where you have this list? No? Nowhere? I mean, there's the XML describing every single possible building. Why isn't there a help function that shows the list, and decodes and prints the XML data into human-understandable help text (or, rather, simply picks the current data in memory, and prints it)?

It's one of my main complaints about the game : there's simply no reference for it. You get tutorial videos, but no Civilopedia.

I think I would call the initial state of a settlement a "village" rather than an "outpost" -- the game also has outposts which have a completely independent set of improvements (and which need a settlement to provide the production to build them).

And, also, resource based improvements sometimes become slightly different when you incorporate them into a settlement.  First, the become defended by the settlement (attacking the resource means attacking the settlement) and also you might have something extra in your shops (for example).