Outposts - I dont quite get it

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.

Personally I have a few issues with outposts:

1) They should give armies defending them a small bonus (they don't do they? I see no indication of it and tried testing a few times and could not see any stat changes)

2) They should take at least one season to become fully active after a pioneer has decided to build one. Maybe even 2-5 seasons.

These are issues...but I have an actual wish. I want outposts to be further incorporated via the tech tree. I'd love to be able to research mini statue defenders for outposts via magic tree. I'd love to research mini-catas or trebs via warfare/civics for outposts. These weapons would act just like city militia and be active in any nme movement over the outpost and be active during any army defenses of said outposts. 

Also I'd love for outposts to be able to build add-ons for bonuses...such as bonuses to the resources they help bring under your control. Bonuses such as flag banners which increase army morale (accuracy/initiative) and decreases that of your enemies while they are in a certain radius around the outpost. This would also mean building these forts is useful near your cities! People are always asking for more faction differences...what of making one of the more militant factions outposts fortresses instead with some of these upgrades or similiar upgrades. That'd be quite unique IMO.

I feel that we are missing a chance to have quite a big strategy addition by outposts *Only* being useful to expand your influence line. There is a reason the GalCiv starbases were so much fun. I'd love to see some this come into play.

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.

Thanks for good info ppl

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

Yep, the cost could be a bit higher.  3 turns production instead of 1 would be a bit better.

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

New cities can only be placed on grain, and only 8 or more squares apart.

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

Of course! ty!

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.

I would like to see multiple levels of Outpost like city level.  Each level could increase the influence/ZOC range and Combat bonus (more on this in a sec).  The Outpost could allow for garrison of units and the amount of units could depend on level.  The reason to garrison an outpost is that they give the garrison a bonus to defense and they defend everything in their ZOC.  Outposts could also be captured.  I would think 3 levels could cover it and they could be named Outpost, Fort and Castle.  If you really want to get fancy certain factions could special versions of the Outpost like a Wizard’s Tower or Citadel.  I like the idea of Cattles dotting the landscape.  

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. 

Also don't forget that your factions total prestige is shared by cities.  More cities = less prestige per city.  Less prestige slows growth rate.

Garrisoned outposts would be really cool.

Definitely agree that we should be able to garrison units in the outposts. 

+1

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

Same functionality, but a tech-up method would not require you to wait for a the training time to occur and transportation time.  Or at least, it would be a different training time and potentially no transportation time.

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.

The outposts are sweet for stretching your ZOC out.  If they are far enough away from your cities, you can devastate any enemies with tremor and pillar of fire.  It would be cool if there was a way to improve their ZOC spread or something like that.  As it stands now, I usually have them all over the map as the pioneer units are so cheap.

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....

Is building on resources like shards free? It appears so to me.

Pioneers should have higher cost (taking about 3 turns to produce) and there should be a gildar cost for building on resources. The map painting is ridiculous and cost nothn.

Ogres, Drakes and such should take more than one round each to produce. 3? On the other hand, as Umber those Drakes are game winners