Maybe it's just me, but the 30-turn wait for outposts to become fully integrated and expand your empire's borders seems a little excessive. Particularly as a constant value, on the Fast game speed it's possible to have a fairly big empire and yet for a large proportion of colonies to still be outposts. Whilst I understand that leaving a reasonably long period of time is what makes cold war a good mechanic, it seems as though 15-20 turns or fewer, at least on the higher game speeds, would allow for cold war aggression against new expansions, but give proper protection to the main body of the empire. After 20+ turns, a colony with good resources and improvements can be pretty impressive - it seems wrong that it's still considered a fair-game border system.



(As an alternative to throw out there, outpost duration could always be modified by population or overall development to allow the process to be sped up manually.)



I haven't seen this issue brought up after searching for it, though, so I could just be doing expansion all wrong.

I like the 30 turns, but I can see how that could be a problem on faster game speeds,

Perhaps making the integration time scale with game speed.

Their should be techs to speed this up.

Also it should scale with you global economy and the gamespeed in the settings.

Yeah, I gotta agree. I had a colony with something like 12 population at one point and it was still an "outpost". If you figure a population point represents about a billion or so that means (fluff wise at least) that 12 billion or so people were living in tents, pre-fab housing and other temporary structures, or 12 billion people crammed into the galaxy's largest refugee camp.



What if this was worked into the research tree somehow? It would probably work best along the diplomacy and trade branch, but you could add a few new system developments that would A) give a small boost to all FIDS for the system (not unlike the outpost), B) increase the rate that cultural boarders expand and C) lower the amount of dust lost due to the distance from the capitol. You could even keep the various improvements unavailable until you hit various population milestones.

I personally think that population of the outpost should directly affect outpost integration. Maybe have a counter, and each turn each population subtracts one point from the counter, then once it reaches 0, bam! It's a colony

I agree that it should scale with game speed and there should also be techs that can increase the time it takes outposts to integrate.

The 30 years integration can be the time the system see a generation. The people living 30 years after are mainly people who were born in the system...



But, maybe other races have another generation time than humans.

I definitely think it should scale dependant on the game speed, maybe it should be different for different races, say if you have a race which is known as being good expansionists, they should integrate quicker.

There could be a pop. cap until the system is in outpost state (who heard about a refugee camp with billions of ppl living in it? )



Or maybe the planet/system should be an outpost until it reaches X population, it could be more 'realistic' that way. I find it odd to imagine that after 30 years a planet with billions of people living on it is still just an outpost with tents and pre-fabs and the likes.



Also the time could vary between races, like Photon wrote, because of the different reproduction time of each race.



Of course, there should be researches to accelerate the growth from OP to a full fledged colony, and improvement restrictions should also apply.

Photon_Ventdesdunes wrote:
The 30 years integration can be the time the system see a generation. The people living 30 years after are mainly people who were born in the system...



But, maybe other races have another generation time than humans.

The problem with that logic is that in the course of 30 years you can see the population of a planet increase by a factor of 10 or more... To put that in perspective you'd be looking at an average birth rate of 20 per female. You do that on earth now you get a TV show on TLC, you do that in the United Empire and you're statistically average. That makes rabbits look like puritans. Not only that but you have to assume that whatever species you are needs at least a few years to grow up. After all a 1 year old isn't going to be much of a contributor to the industrial output of a planet so the actual population on a planet would have to be significantly higher.



It's a problem endemic to 4X games. On the one one hand you've got the relatively slow paced growth of an empire, but on the other hand you have the need to move ships around at a more reasonable rate of speed relative to gameplay. You can't just say every turn represents 10 years because then every single ship is a generational ship and it would be impossible to actually manage an empire. If you say every turn is a year like ES (and most other 4X space games) then you've got insane population growth.



Really it's better to just separate the two entirely and imagine the years going by as a simple turn ticker rather than a realistic depiction of the passage of time. It only becomes jarring when you see something like the outposts pops up where the devs have actually said (perfectly reasonably) that it should take 30 odd years for a colony to become self sufficient.

imperialus wrote:
The problem with that logic is that in the course of 30 years you can see the population of a planet increase by a factor of 10 or more... I mean we're talking rabbit like breeding speeds.

You can imagine a lot of this people at the beginning come also from other colonies. Or it can be local populations you integrate little by little. It doesn't have to be the people from the first ship and only them.

Photon_Ventdesdunes wrote:
You can imagine a lot of this people at the beginning come also from other colonies. Or it can be local populations you integrate little by little. It doesn't have to be the people from the first ship and only them.

Even with people coming from other planets it doesn't solve the huge disconnect regarding the rate of population growth over time. I mean your homeworld starts with a pop of 3, by turn 30 you're likely to have 4 or more colonies depending on how aggressively you've expanded and a population of 50 or more. All those people gotta come from somewhere.



I edited my previous post to clarify. I don't think this is a 'problem' that ES needs to worry itself with correcting because it's been a part of 4X games for as long as I can remember, as long as the gameplay works then I'm not going to overly concern myself with the numbers ticking up in the bottom right corner of the screen.



My only issue is when the artificial 'ticker' edges over into gameplay. To be forced to wait 30+ turns before your colonies cultural influence starts to develop does have a negative effect on gameplay since it creates a situation where you've got these massive populations that due to not having reached a particular 'milestone' that has nothing to do with the success of the colony cannot effectively control their own airspace (or would that be space-space?). I had an incident where a well established colony of mine ended up completely cut off from the rest of the empire because it ended up in the sphere of influence for a rival empire just because he founded a colony a couple of turns before me.



You see a similar problem when trying to assimilate a conquered system. Oftentimes for 10 or more turns the pop (of even a small colony) will be on 'strike' and costing your empire a small fortune in dust each turn. It would probably be more efficient to simply bombard the population from orbit and rebuild from scratch rather than try to integrate them into your empire.

imperialus wrote:
You see a similar problem when trying to assimilate a conquered system. Oftentimes for 10 or more turns the pop (of even a small colony) will be on 'strike' and costing your empire a small fortune in dust each turn. It would probably be more efficient to simply bombard the population from orbit and rebuild from scratch rather than try to integrate them into your empire.

*this or spending a few thousand in dust to immediately build some happiness and invasion recovery rate improvements.



Thankfully, razing a system has been brought up and is on the to-do list.

Virus wrote:
Their should be techs to speed this up.

Also it should scale with you global economy and the gamespeed in the settings.

Techs to speed this up would be a very nice idea and edition to the game. But as of right now how it stands, I don't so much mind the 30 turn set up, though you'd think that after the first time colonizing different planets, they would find a more efficient way to do it. The Tech would be a really awesome thing to implement, but I see a lot or the majority of players running to it to get faster colonization.

It hasn't bothered me yet, but I'm all for this being an player selectable option at map\game creation time.