a question about a system with a "foreign" outpost

[ucla_vince]

I have a system with a colony, and it says that another race has an outpost there. The system name is bracketed, and there is another planet in the system with an outpost on it that I didn't build. I would assume that this is the outpost in question, but I'm confused because the name of the outpost is in my color. It says that the Lanniserrani are in the system (whoever they are, I haven't met anyone else yet). So is that the way it's supposed to be? I would've thought the outpost would be a different color...

[CharlesBHoff]

It happen to me afew time they are people from your empire
who settle on their own. They either join your empire later or they remain indepence on their own.

[Sir Alkis]

If you have a colony with a magnate civilization, these people colonize on their own (without any colony/outpost ships). They just take their private spaceships and settle somewhere.

What you can do is set migration to that colony and in time it will grow to full colony status. You can do that because it's your color.

To set migration on go to planets screen (press F7). Go to uncontrolled/orders/set migration on.

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[Vince278]

I thought you could only migrate to planets (names starting with capital letters) and not outposts (names with small first letters). Outposts don't show up on the owned planet lists. (Unless I'm doing something wrong)

[PaulNAdhe]

That's right. Outposts don't show up when you've selected 'owned planets'. That's why Sir Alkis said to select uncontrolled.

Do that and you'll probably want to set the sort order to name so you can easily find the outpost planet. Then set the migration and soon you'll have a nice new planet in your empire and it didn't cost you a single AU.

[Vince278]

Thanx. I'll give that a shot.

[MichaeltheGreat]

You can actually skip building colony ships altogether, and expand solely by outpost and migration, much faster than if you build colony ships.

[Vince278]

Now that you mention it, that appears to be what I see the AI doing alot. I may give that a shot also.

[MichaeltheGreat]

The AI builds colony ships, but it does the expand from outpost trick a lot too. The nasty thing (I hate AI cheats, AI software development in the last 15 years of gaming is an embarassment) is that I've never actually seen an AI outpost ship. You can't kill what doesn't exist, so it's essentially impossible to stop enemy outposts.

I just preempt them in my early star systems by outposting everything above size 3.