Currently a deployed outpost mounts a reactor and an outpost system. Materials cost is slightly less then a colony ship. Perhaps add a hydroponics bay as a possible outpost system choice. + 1 food at start, +1 additional for Artificial Organisms (total +2), +1 additional for weather control (total +3). This would allow the use to a limited extent of gas giants and null systems, buffer food supplies in mid game, and make a guns or butter choice (competing with ships for metal mid game).
Other orbitals such as stations might also be able to use one in their station slot.
Food produced would go into food pool, so freighters would be needed to move it. Overall food produced would be low, expensive compared to farms, and easily disrupted or destroyed, but for rear line areas could be an interesting production dynamic.

What we plan to do with the Outpost is to make it a more generic hull with a Station slot, and use it both as the deploy-able Outpost and in place of the current Space Station. So you can build one in orbit outfitted with a Construction module, or build one configured for transport with an Outpost module on it and deploy it remotely. That way if you eventually get the technology to colonize the planet that has an outpost, you can refit it with a more useful Station slot item (like a Construction module) instead of having to scrap it. Potentially, you could build a deploy-able outpost already fitted with a Construction module so that you can get a new colony world up and running quickly (the transport version is more expensive, but can be built more quickly on a developed world).

There are other things that we could put in Station slots (like Spaceport modules to enhance trade), but I think space habitats or farms should probably require a larger structure than the small outpost/station hull. Space habs and the like are things we'd like to explore somewhere down the road.

Pity to lose the current station graphic though, maybe have enough variation to use both?

Chasm wrote:Pity to lose the current station graphic though, maybe have enough variation to use both?

Well, the current Space Station graphic is just a kludge of the deployed Ashdar outpost graphic. They're really the same thing.

I would like to see some deployable to allow us to use gas giants in some aspect (though at a reduced ability). An expensive orbital that produced at a lesser rate then a ground facility might fit the bill.

Chasm wrote:I would like to see some deployable to allow us to use gas giants in some aspect (though at a reduced ability). An expensive orbital that produced at a lesser rate then a ground facility might fit the bill.

I think the main thing that a gas giant would be useful for would be as a source of special resources. That's something we'd like to do, and in that case, an Outpost would probably be involved in providing access to that resource.

I've won one Huge/99 on Normal, playing on Hard now. Haven't used a single Outpost, wasn't using them in MoO/MoO2 neither. In the early game resources are too precious to waste, in the late game you can go wherever you want anyway. What am I missing?

The only current case in which you'd want to use an outpost would be early in the game if you can't explore any farther in a certain direction because there are no habitable planets to establish a colony on. That rarely happens.

I think I once used one because I wanted to make a back-door attack on an opponent. That's a very niche use.

Lack of colonizable planets happens pretty often to me in early game when I'm playing one of the aquatic races. It's pretty annoying while playing as, say, the Gremak, which have a perfectly-adapted-to-arid slave race in the Enfi, and being unable to colonize these worlds almost all the way into late game.

In any case, outposts make a lot of sense to Phidi and Gremak, a bit less to Orthin.

It used to be the case that Colony Ships would use whatever was the majority population on the constructing planet; this led to strange situations in which the player could end up unintentionally creating colonies of a secondary race, which was awkward especially in the case of the Enfi, who are supposed to be a slave race. So we removed that "feature." I think it may eventually make sense to allow the construction of multiple different Colony Ships for each eligible colonist type on the constructing planet, but I think we would still need to manage which colonists are eligible to start a new colony. Slave or subjugated or certain naitve populations (like the Gaiads), for example, probably shouldn't be eligible. So this is a feature which will probably have to wait until we implement the population morale feature (which comes after the diplomacy/event feature).