The unit que idea could've been attached to say a barracks. No barrack = units wait till buildings completed, with barracks = units and buildings trained side by side. Not disbelieving anybody perse, i'm only a recent arrival and as such is still seems like a good idea - perhaps a more detailed reason why it removed opportunity cost, or why that phrase is so important. 

The game would be significantly better if some of the monsters favored champions, player and a.i. alike over small towns. From a savage beasts point of view the soft target of a settlement 2 turns after creation is a no-brainer, from a players perspective its pure frustration. More when a hoarder spider and an enemy army (several armies) are all lined up in my territory and the monster just joins in the city stomping fun instead of killing them it really looks like their 'double and triple checking' was a fail. If settlements are harder to acquire and this behavior continued, this would be even more maddening.

Outpost spam isn't near annoying as city spam was.  Pioneers are cheap for land grab.  That's the name of the game.  Elemental: Land Grabber.  I don't see them adjusting the pioneer cost.

I've got a few thoughts on this thread:

1) you don't need to rush to grab all the land and can do fine with 1-3 cities for a large stretch of the game - if the AI grabs loads of land its no big deal. I find I build up massive stockpiles of unused resources in everything except dip cap and gold - the main limiting factor to armies is maintenance costs not resource stockpiles

2) Stardock include some good early game buildings which are often a better route to go than pioneers in the first 20ish turns - militia are another good choice too if there's alot of tricky monsters

3) I agree with DSRaider's post about the monsters not doing their job to limit expansion - they should attack pioneers and unguarded outposts on sight so then it would limit pioneer cheese - Tarth's outposts should not get any extra protection - their bonus is for exploration, not unhindered expansion. The monsters in FFH were very good at limiting expansion and also seriously threatening your starting city in the early game - I know that games have drifted to a softy hand holding approach these days (in this case, tame monsters) but I want an option for highly aggressive, no-nonsense monsters

4) To those moaning about buildings taking too long I say that all good strategy games must involve opportunity cost either in time, resources, maintenance, or precluding other options - Stardock have removed pretty much all of the limits except time - true, some buildings require resources and some have maintenance, but not many. The one they have chosen to use is time, if they reduce building times they will need to reinstate some of the other restrictions - it's a strategy game fundamental to have opportunity cost.

I agree the spamming of cities and outposts isn't fun. It turns the (early) game into a frantic land grab rather than a phase of exploration and careful development of your starting area.

To me, the three game phases should play out roughly as follows:
Early game: Exploration of part of the map, clearing nearby monster lairs that aren't too tough, possibly some skirmishes with nearby opponent over valuable resource or because of different alignment, development of you capital and perhaps settling one or two new towns. About 10% of the map is under control of a player or AI.
Mid game: Explored most of the map, clearing remaining monster lairs near starting area, maybe try a wildlands, develop first few settlements into cities, settling or conquering 3-4 new towns, first serious war(s). About a third of the map is more or less civilised.
Late game: Taking on remaining wildlands, expanding into an empire or create an alliance, head for a victory condition. By the end, maybe two thirds of the map is civilised, the rest is either unusable, or so covered in lairs and crawling with patrols that it's not worth the investment of clearing it.

One way to curb the pioneer spam would be to make them more of an investment (like in civ). This could be done either by making their equipment more expensive (building a town takes a lot of resources), requiring a greater population investment, or both. Population should be more important early game anyway. If your capital has a population of about 200 people, sending away 50 to build an outpost or new town means your economy takes quite a hit (providing population doesn't grow back in a handful of turns).

I think you're all forgetting something -- and i'm not opposed to restricting city-spam -- Shards (and other wild recourses too) - specifically getting enough of them to compete magically (or economically or even militarily(metal) (when the A.I. becomes a magic slinging god like the player), and keeping them. Both difficult or tedius projects when a: you have no nearby city to produce guards to protect them and b: your one or two big cities can't produce units because they are building buildings and can't train units. Which brings back to the aforementioned, 'i'm glad it failed in a stinking ball of something' seperate unit/building ques. Outposts having barracks would make sense from a RL pov but would be even worse spam-wise in the game. 

And clearing the monsters out is fine and all, but that just means the A.I. moves in. Probably like all four, five, six of them at once into the peviously untennable no-mans land. They really do hang about with groups of three or four pioneers all waiting for outposts to be destroyed by monsters, other a.i.s and players right now, and that isn't likely to change, and if it did would make them even tamer. Make monsters stronger, make stronger monsters have a smaller range but remain ferocious and make them squash the A.I. too (they really really don't (in-fact they line up with the a.i. players to attakc the same settlement turn after turn after turn), and the city spam and outpost spam will more or less take care of itself. However the game will seem somewhat slower. Magic will be hampered by lack of mana. Recources will be hard to scrape together limiting unit numbers even if a seperate que or solution is established and so on and so forth.

'I beat a.i. with one or two cities' how? I can kind of see it, but only because the a.i, is patently stupid, and how many turns did it take you to get three armies led by your three champions?

How about the ability to reprioritse the que, building with 3 turns left to comlete dragged to another place in the que so a unit can be trained in 9 turns instead of 12? You've arealy paid the opportunity cost, the game punishes you with an upfront fee the moment anything is qued. (i personally find this a little cumbersome).  

no i'm not suggesting it anytihn i'm simply stating what does happen when you clear out the monsters. In my current game, the middle of the map had most of the monsters, there gone and now there is half a dozen diffent coloured boxes representing the different a.i. players outposts and occasional city. the colours are constantly changing now that there's all out war (by my instigation). 

IF the monsters patrolled more effectively but in tighter areas, (except for the weaker ones which should roam more freely), then the A.I. and the player would have to expand slowly. Point A: i have not seen monsters ever attack an a.i. Point B: even if they did, which would be good and would  ease my shard/wild recourse owning fears somewhat ----> Everyone = poor = slow and with minimal (i stress minimal) magic available to cast at enemys, use on the map and summon units. HOW is that a good thing? My point is this: IF, they control City Spam; With monsters, new A.I. or some other method or combination, THEN they will need to streamline the following: Structure Building, Unit Building, Research, Mana growth, Income, Population Growth etc..... Seriously, the game is slow. OK its a 4x game, they're never fast, but they aint that slow either, and the ones that are, never do as well. M.A.X. (a not fantasy) turn-based game had a long build-time of buildings, but those buildings all built something or provided research, allowing the game to pick up momentum after that 15 (light facory) 24 (heavy factory/air factory) turn investment. Elemental does not do it that well, or does not do that, and the buildings that do speed up research, build speed etc. need to be researched themselves, then built for many many turns. Having several cities, shards is one of the few (only?) ways of negating this hideous snail slither. 

In any other 4X game I would say pioneer spam is the point of the game. Expansion at all costs. But Act I of FE is supposed to prevent expansion until the war against the world is won. The game has shifted towards monsters being designed to allow outposts and cities to exist near them. I think that is a bad design choice. I would hazard a guess that this was done to bypass some problems with monster AI. I implore the devs to take another look at the AI and see if you can get it to play at a level that allows for monsters to protect their territory from all others. Otherwise I the dread pioneer rush has little deterrent. A flaw that limits the potential of this game in my opinion. I am an Act I loyalist and I want the world to try to kill me. I want it to raze my cities and raid my resources. I want it to kill every last one of the citizens and push me to the brink of ruin. I don't want it to just be a side factor when expanding. It would be better to have a partially functioning monster AI that is aggressive than one that only attacks units, but functions as intended.

I can always just build an outpost where I am if a powerful enemy is like to kill me? That is not the strategic game I want to play.

I agree with a lot of the sentiment stated above. It does feel like the fight with wilderness ends far too quickly, and that pioneer spam is necessary if you want any chance to expand. However, I think what many of the posts suggesting more aggressive monsters fail to take into account is how difficult it would be for the (non-monster) AI to deal with this. I think frogboy had a post earlier stating that deciding when/where to expand is one of the hardest things to program into the AI. It wouldn't seem very fun if, upon reaching the late game, you realize half of your AI opponents already died or failed to expand past their starting area. 

One solution might be to build a wall of really tough aggressive monsters between starting points. Give each player a designated area where they can expand slowly (or quickly) without competition until at least the mid game. 

Totally agree. There should be a need to clear out and protect every new outpost/city area. The monsters are too docile now.

I found pioneer spam help me come back from almost utter devastation. I had one city and the opponents were significantly stronger than I was for the first 200 turns, but i managed to stay alive (with the help of the pillar of flame strategic spell and mass poison tactical spell (can't remember the name of that one)). So after slowly plugging away, i would pioneer spam to grow my borders so i could use strategic spells to damage my opponents before sending my main army in to finish them. By turn 400 I was starting to turn the corner and become a force to recon with. Until I eventually won around turn 600 or so. My opponents started with telling me they were going to take my towns and destroy me, then they said they couldn't beat me so they would break all my outposts, then they said they couldn't hurt me so they would curse my towns (i was grateful for the notification so i could dispel them). I really enjoyed this, my 3rd game at .915.

It does seem the AI can build with impunity and the monsters seem leave them alone.  Frogboy said that monsters will not go after outposts, which I think is a horrible mistake.  Having them go after outposts would in part eliminate some of the spamming.  I had a rampaging Ashwake Dragon last night.  That was a little bit of a pain in the butt on season 200.

As far as the OP, I still think an outpost should be a bigger investment---money, materials, and time.  If it cost all three of those then you would just not be able to make as many, particularly early on.  In addition, placement of the outpost would become even more important.  Can I place this outpost within reach of two or three resources?  Someone suggested that have a tech upgrade where they can have troops stationed to be able to defend resources in the ZOC.  I think a couple upgrades later would also be a good choice.  Again making placement more important.

Adding into this discussion, my first several games were ruined by the ease of building new cities. I explored, found a nice spot, built a city. Then teched a few things and explored and did a few adventures. When my first settler came out after that, I found every inch of ground covered by AI settlers, and more of them wandering by. The game was unplayable, and like Gal Civ on high levels of difficulty, your only hope is to spam out cities to build an instant empire. Annoying and not fun. MOO2 had a much slower, more suspenseful early game pace, and I'm missing it!

Excellent Idea, Torin!

Just have it cost 5 or 10 pop to make a new city. Zap, instant balance! You won't be spamming settlers then, and if you do, you'll have no one at home to build anything. Of course, the AI would have to be retuned to reflect this change in the rules.