Currently, after your second outpost/colony, each new outpost gives you a fixed additional expansion disapproval that is set in stone for the rest of the game (before tech bonuses). As such, an empire with e.g. 10 well-established colonies would have the same expansion disapproval per-system as an empire with the home system, one colony, and 8 outposts. This seems a bit off to me, as an empire that is relatively stable you would expect to have less expansion disapproval than one that is, well, expanding. While it is true that the stable empire will have had more time to build improvements that counteract the effect, just the fact of the stability should contribute to lessening 'expansion disapproval', to my mind.



What I suggest is that colonies and outposts should contribute different values to the overall expansion disapproval of your empire. I'd leave the balancing up to the devs, but to kick off discussion lets say outposts contribute 110% of the current value, and once an outpost converts to a colony it contributes 55%.



A nice side effect of this would be more distinction between colonies and outposts, which is not so strong right now IMO.

I like this idea.

Nice suggestion!

Although I voted "yes": Isn't this the fact already? The last time I played was with version 1.0.6 I think but I think to remember that outposts had different expansion disapprovals than colonies. While thinking about it, I feel it was the other way round than you suggested here (outposts are cheaper than colonies). Could somebody please help my weak memory?