I actually like the concept of outposts. They are border outposts used as a means to expand your influence. Most of the upgrades make perfect sense. Better sight ranges makes sense (higher towers). Slowing enemy armies makes sense (assume guard patrols). Speeding up your own armies makes sense (assume transportation of army supply). etc..

I have had many situations where the enemy could quickly raid my territory and destroy valuable shards with a single unit in a single turn. Other situations where the enemy could raid into my territory in a single turn and take the outpost. Once I upgraded, this no longer happened and I could hit them with a tremor and take them out.

I have two problems with outposts. First with the economy so tight it's often difficult to station troops at important outposts. I think a tech or two that stations a small garrison in the outposts to discourage a single unit taking it from you would be nice. Also I think a general review of the techs available needs to be done. Abby seems worthless. Fortify and Armory makes sense if you plan to station a single troop there to protect the tower but often it's the resources within the tower radius that needs protection. Are we supposed to station troops everywhere?  A few techs to add a garrison (like city garrisons) to the outpost would be nice.

I finally have to say that I want outposts to have an option to have their own build queue.

This is because I am actually plotting to mod some different "objects" that will function as outposts however produce specified things. One example is "Small Town" and another is "Monastery". Like outposts, they would have their own improvements and produce everything "on itself" rather than using external plots. Letting them have their own build queue would then be good for my project.

In addition to freeing up town build queues, you can regulate the development of outposts individually. Outposts might not be able to rush build. It might require Stone to build improvements for them. (Yeah, I see your stone commented out).

You could also make so we can only build them within X tiles of a City Hub. This would prevent across the world Arcane Monolith abusing, and encourage natural, sprawling development.

Right now, once an area is "held", all outposts within it become nullified and all buildings you "have" become worthless except the Food modification. There should be more outpost improvements that provide use value once it is no longer required for defensive reasons. Outposts have different reasons for being placed: defending an area, snagging a resource, blocking an AI, expansion... however, once that purpose is "served" there is no further "use" except growth.

To this end, outpost improvements that continue providing use value once the purpose is served would increase the fun factor. Having them hold their own build queues and not be able to rush means they will develop all game. You might start by placing the outpost to fortify an area, and once you clean the zone, you start building domestic improvements.

Lastly, this could justify reducing the intensity and sprawl of some of the buildings, connecting their use to outposts or outpost types. This diversifies gameplay and gives more use to outposts.

There are tough issues when working with outposts on the modding end. One is that there is only one classification of outpost. I could take a small village improvement, make a variation that can be placed by a spell and upgraded. However, I cannot dictate it to have a limit of 6 tiles from a City Hub, give it it's own build queue or things like that.

Outposts as is can be modded to have buffs for the whole empire, however I think you have a good point about outposts not providing enough benefit once the reason for building it is fulfilled (containing an area, winning a war, expanding way beyond the resource you placed it to snag).

One unspoken way an outpost becomes good:  You have the food building. Later, you settle a city near it, and it gains ownership of the outpost, immediately and forever helping that city.

Of course, this takes that growth away from the city which lost it.

I don't know of anything that would cause the outpost to "grow over time". I wish I did! You can use CityHubs to perform some things, like unlock an item from the shop, make a building available, make a spell available. In the same way, any outpost addition can be modded to give research instead of attack/defense bonus however you could say that such an effect is better "in the city" and not on the outpost. You could put it on both but then you have to redesign research times to consider the new source of research. This creates an either-or situation, and my intention is to create a few unique outpost types to move some buildings out of the big city and into a rural community or fortress.

Also, anything that happens to outposts also happens to Arcane Monolith. There would be nothing fun about casting a spell to place libraries, mana shards and crystal troves all over your empire.

Schatten: I feel like that is how outposts SHOULD be used. But in general, you need a large amount of outposts in a game. That is a huge amount of resources to put into each one, and why they are so unappealing. I would really like to see larger borders on outposts so you can build less of them, and get more out of the upgrading.

I've started taking to spamming outposts around Fort settlements, since they typically have crap growth rates, especially since I upgrade all of them into Prisons by default...

"Oh, your growth is <1? *rush train Pioneer, build outpost, build Consulate*"

I just noticed something, that I have to ask whether is intentional or not: Fortify and Armory bonuses from two different outposts appear to both apply to a unit in the area of influence of both outposts. They do *not* stack multiplicatively (the bonus from each outpost is exactly the same, and is the same bonus you'd get being in the radius of only one outpost).

True, but then again you can build a lot of outposts connected to a city... this might have been a way to mitigate this obvious abuse of power. The cost so high as to prohibit the abuse, but not so high to prevent players from using it... not sure if they hit the second mark.

I would agree that the production costs are whats keeping them from being expanded upon.

What if outposts produced a unit periodically (sort of like the shards do with elementals )?   If that was an upgrade I'd probably go for that, or maybe if they added another construction queue.

That was a common tactic of mine in FE - build a few tiny groups of inexpensive warg riders whose sole purpose was to charge into rear areas and cap outposts / destroy resources. 

I don't recall pioneers using population to build in FE (someone please correct me if I'm wrong). Now that you can't just spam your build queue with pioneers without jacking the city pop, I think outposts have become more costly, and more costly generally means more valuable. Thus, their improvements should have lower costs in general - we've already paid the expensive part up front.

There seem to be several issues regarding outposts that people have problems with:

Cost

Consuming a pioneer to build an outpost is expensive, especially compared to Pariden's relatively cheap Monolith.  I have already weighed in on this by suggesting pioneers be merely immobilized instead of consumed, just to keep within functionality that already exists in game.

Connection to Cities

This isn't just an issue with outposts, but with the resources as well.  Routing materials to Conclaves instead of Fortresses, especially when you are trying to crank out troops, is not always ideal.  Built resources and outposts should connect to the nearest city by default, but be capable of being re-routed to other cities.  Perhaps limit your choices to the 3 closest cities so that you can't just route all materials to one super-city on the other side of the map.  Some sort of quick set buttons on the city screen to route as much materials/food/research to this city as possible would make it less of a chore and probably help the AI use the same tactic.  A lock function on the connection to prevent a certain resource from being rerouted by a quick set would be useful too.  A delay upon changing routing where the resources don't go anywhere for a few turns might be necessary to prevent gaming the system on a turn by turn basis.

Build queues for Upgrades

The issue still remains for where to build upgrades.  Some have suggested separate build queues.  I think they are nuts.  Would having more build queues make this game more fun?  IMHO, no.  It would just add more micromanagement.  Some have suggested automatic upgrades.  That has logistical issues with the order in which upgrades happen, and it seems to remove the tactical decision making process, making it an automatic thing that just happens and you mostly ignore.  Some have suggested fixed upgrade levels.  That seems a bit one-dimensional to me and cuts off differing strategies.  Some have suggested moving outpost upgrades to the city queue and having them affect the ZoC for the city and all attached outposts.  This one seems to make sense strategically and would simplify the whole system, in addition to making it easier for the AI to use these upgrades.  The only upgrade I can see a problem with is High Tower.  That one often gets used only in specific areas to bridge gaps or make more efficient use of outpost costs.  It could still just be applied to all outposts connected to the city, but some of the very specific uses that we have become used to are changed.  I still think it would work, though.

One byproduct of moving ZoC upgrades to the city is that kingdoms that build few cities could more efficiently gain ZoC bonuses, making less cities a more viable strategy.

IMO, simplifying outpost upgrades to the city level would make them easier to use, and therefore more commonly used, which would make invasions and raids more difficult than it is presently.  This is especially true if having them at the city level made it easier for the AI to use them.  The "home turf" advantage would be much more significant when invading the AI.  I don't know about you, but once I can defeat one AI army, I can pretty much steamroll them from then on.  If there were a significant home field advantage it might even the playing field for the less powerful kingdoms that are on the defensive against ones with a large military.  This would extend the game and, who knows, maybe I might even be able to research past the middle of the tech tree for once. 

A potential way of doing this is that once an upgrade is unlock it is added into an auto que within the outpost such that there is no micro management to upgrading the outposts.