You can instantly build on resources to exploit them with influence with an outpost (and no population) but not with a city?

I agree this is bit counter-intuitive if you're coming from Civ. Most players seem to think that influence is too scare at the start and too plentiful at the end; using production for resource exploitation would seem to help fix that.

It's a bit strange. Perhaps it would be better if you could only build there if the city is connected to the territory, or if the cost of influence was much higher so it's more of a sacrifice to get it going, the time spent collecting Influence representing the effort to get everything in place to extract. Overall it seems part of a move to make Influence more important. I like having to use it to spend on laws, for instance. But this seems a little less well thought-out. But I appreciate the direction.

I thought it was just an aesthete ability.

Kwami wrote:

In Victor, you could have the outpost slowly put production toward extractors and the like. That was better than the current system of spending influence to instantly get extractors.

Yup.