FreeOrion

I think asteroid mining is very flavorful and beloved by lots of players.


This would just delay the problem that players are urged to send outposts everywhere.

I totally agree with the first post of eleazar about the implementation of outposts, but would love to see mining outposts (or advanced outposts or whatever they should be named) that can only be build on objects that cannot have colonies (Asteroids and later Gas Giants). Mining outposts should do everything a normal outpost does plus generate ressources.

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So do I.

Like i said, we have at least a couple of options to keep some sort of revised asteroid mining in the game. I'm not inclined to replace it with nothing.

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Any chance we can get "real" zero population outposts enabled soon? It would make squaring off population simpler if there were no more simulated outposts.

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Depends on your definitions of "soon" and "real zero population outposts". I've been quite busy the last month or so, and probably will be for a few weeks more, so no much programming progress has happened. I'm also not really sure what is needed for outposts... There's probably a summary somewhere, but a new one might help.

Outposts are generally inferior to Colonies. Their two advantages:

They are cheaper than colonies.
You can put them In places where colonies won't survive.

I'm sure a lot of of the desired differences can be done via scripting, so there should to be an easy way to filter by Outpost, Colony, or Outpost & Colony. Possibly the tag system can do that.

I'm probably including stuff that can be done/adjusted via scripting, but i'll err on the side of including too much

Basic Outpost Summary

Similarities to Colonies
* Can create supply lines (both kinds)
* Provide vision & detection
* Can be defended and invaded like colonies

Differences
* Have no population (and thus can't die from starvation)
* Can be replaced with a colony (if you would be able to colonize without the outpost)

Details not determined:
* Should outposts be labeled with a species?
* Should outpost conquest be the same as ground combat?

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I think not. IF no one lives there, then there's no species for the population to be.
Much easier. No personel means only a handful of security guards.

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I always envisioned outpost as bases that are not unmanned, just have small enough population to not register as a settlement (a few dozen individuals). The population is not large enough to be capable of building anything sophisticated or reproduction (limited gene pool).
Outposts are enabled by environment encapsulation, which implies a small habitable space.
Then again, unmanned outposts could be realistically cheaper to sustain.

Of course any personnel present would not stand a chance against quantities of troops normally issued against colonies.

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For most purposes there is little difference between the two. I could go either way, or choose whichever one makes more sense with the mechanics we ultimately choose.


My questions was weather the mechanics should be the same, not the quantities. And you could plausible suppose that a small outpost could be built with defenses that would greatly multiply the difficulty of capture, relative to a whole planet. -- this is of course assuming the goal is capture.

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Capturing should use the same mechanics, IMO. Whether this means they also need to have a species associated with them or not depends on whether or not the species of a planet's troops depends on its species (an issue of "role"). I don't want to make any assumptions about that or any other species-related bonuses that might be associated with outposts, so I'd say yes, outposts should have species.

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Is there a reason an "outpost" can't just be a zero population colony? Instead of zero population meaning a colony is lost, it would just change into an outpost. The rules for colonization would be tweaked so colonizing zero max-population planets is allowed. Outpost ships would be colony ships that have a population capacity of zero. To match outposts with a condition, you'd select planets with an owner but zero population. Outposts would have all the functions of a colony that don't depend on a particular species or having nonzero population.

Several minutes pondering could find no flaw with that approach.

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A first try at that has been committed. I didn't try making a zero-capacity colony part, but zero-target-population planets can be colonized, will then have their population die off (and species set to none), and can be re-colonized, all while staying owned by the same empire. These planets retain their resource output abilities, and still have shields, detection, fleet supply, and other colony-type abilities and properties. Presumably invasions should work the same regardless of what amount of population is present on a planet.

question: how does that interact with Phototrophic?

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I'm not sure what you mean... If a planet has a target population of 0, it has a target population of 0, regardless of the metabolism type of the inhabiting species

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