I think they should auto upgrade. Planting them sooner brings you long term benefits. Basically they grow over time. (some factions have unique upgrades)

Right now I rarely touch them. Also what mqpfille said. 

I only use them if I expect to be in that area again.  Otherwise, no use for any of them except the consulate and maybe the tower to grab that one last resource.

When playing high difficulty it is possible to trick with them: you can place one so that a town is in range, so the bonus is given to these units inside the town, too, when I saw that right... or I place one near to a dragon, rush the upgrades and then attack.

I occasionally use the Hightower. Other then that no. Other people seem to like Wardens but I usually clear out all the monsters weak enough to be effected by it. Coltraps are too late game. Stables affect too small of an area. The chances of actually fighting anything beside an outpost is way too unlikely so I never build the stat boosting ones. You're much better off defending a city then using any of the defensive ones. I might start using the consulate because in LH growth has been slowed.

One thing I would love to see as a outpost upgrade is roads. Allow us to manually spawn roads to outposts. Instead of having a tech do it to all of them. This would just be a much better system.

The point of outposts is to spread your territory to claim resources. For Outposts to serve any military purpose you actually have to be to able to hinder enemies with them. Firstly making coltraps appear earlier on the tech tree would help a lot. Changing the Abbey to significantly reduce the cost of offensive strategic spells would also help. The high tower could also have a vision of 6 to show incoming armies. With these changes it would be worthwhile to build outposts on your borders to slow invasions.

I use them rarely... mostly because I forget.  The upgrades aren't interesting enough to remember I guess.  When I do remember, I choose Consulates, but I think they have way too expensive labor cost.  I tried Warden when I was next to some nasty monsters, but I don't think it helped much.  I would use Hightower, but my games are usually over by then.

I agree with some of the other ideas that they should either:

a ) auto-upgrade when you learn the technology

b ) use their own production queues

c ) be more interesting choices

I rarely use them except for the range extender because training a unit is always more valuable. 

My two cents:

Fewer better upgrades (combine existing ones). 

Passive leveling based over time where  the distance to your cities comes into play.

What if upgrades were built (in a relatively short time) by either Champions or soldiers (or both) stationed at the outpost? By that I mean you take your army and park it on the outpost and set it building something and number of building units (champions or soldiers) and a few turns later it's done.

Implementation wise you could give outposts a build queue and an amount of 'matierals' decided by the number of build capable units on the tile at the end of a turn. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure you couldn't mod this mechanic in, it's stuff I'm pretty sure only the devs have access to.

EDIT: also steam could probably track these kinda stats for the devs.... help em see which upgrades just never get used or which features need to be made more useful/apparent (like many people I often forget about outpost upgrades all together).

I use High Tower to expand ZOC to grab a resource or to connect cities.  Outposts are too flimsy to risk investing much in them, warden is unreliable, especially near wildlands,   Consulate is kinda cheap, and the other stuff is boring.

I think the problem is mechanically, it's micromanagement for the most part.  I think the System would work better if outposts had levels and the upgrades were based off of level.

My suggestion: Outposts have three levels beyond initial outpost, unsure what the cost to upgrade should be.

Each level of outpost provides some benefits, lvl 1 outpost keeps "weak" monster groups out, lvl 2 keeps "medium" out, lvl 3 keeps "strong" out.  Also makes it require that level of strength to take the outpost from enemy troops.   Outposts would provide other bonuses (military related- dump consulate/stables/abbey)

High Tower effect would come in on lvl 2

Caltrops on lvl 3.

The effects of the abbey should probably be handled by a world wonder instead of a fortress upgrade.

The effects of consulates- I could see that being a Krax bonus, outposts increase growth slightly based on fortress level (but does not stack)

I use most of the upgrades.  Outposts can be strategically placed for high benefit.  

Superhighway - Place them between cities and build High Tower and Stables.  You will get your units to where  you need them the most much faster, thereby allowing you to respond with more force to intruding armies, and also as a way to reinforce marching armies faster.  This can make a big difference.

Choke Points - Place an Outpost at a narrow gap that you can't build a city at, upgrade it with Caltrops,and High Tower if needed.  If you don't have a Fortress choking the point further down the line, then it's worth making the combat-affecting upgrades and keeping a roaming army ready to dispatch any enemies that enter the zone.  The combat boosts make a big difference.  Also Stables when you get the chance just so you can get to the intruding enemy faster.

Growth - There's not much else to increase growth in the game.  Even the food bonus is capped at +3.  Usually my Superhighway outposts are also upgraded to produce additional growth.

So, yeah, some of the upgrades I barely use, but when I do use them, they make a big difference.  I play on Insane level difficulty, so I really need to break out all the tricks (although not as much in LH since you get the two extra units at start, which makes a huge difference).

That works?  I didn't think it would apply to stationed units, so I didn't actually give it a try.  If that works, that'll really help me.  I'm going to give it a try.

I usually don't upgrade too much, but for me consulate on key cities and high tower to close gaps or gain resources are the most common.  I don't think the cost is worth the upgrades most of the time, don't want to invest too much in something that can be destroyed so easily, or the area of effect of the buffs is too small to justify the effort.

I think outposts could use some buffs and tweaks.  The base area of effect is too small.  An enemy unit can conquer the outpost the moment it gets in visible range because the zone edge is so close to the outpost.  That makes them hard to protect without a garrison and not worth a huge investment.   Monsters still seem to go through warden as noted above, especially by wildlands.

What happens if a city snakes to an outpost that has the combat/movement bonuses, etc?

I had it happen once while building my own 'superhighway' as Darxim calls it, and I noticed that the improvments (specifically stables) moved into the cities' list of buildings but honestly I didn't do much testing as to how it works, just wrote it off as weird and moved on.

EDIT: well that was interesting. Did some testing with Pariden and arcane monolyth and the basic attack/defense upgrades and it seems that if you snake to an outpost after building upgrades in it, everything works fine. the upgrades are in the list for the city as one of 'its' buildings, but in the outposts list too so you can't build them again. If you build an upgrade there after snaking to it it only appears in the list for the city, not the outpost and so you can build it again, an infinite number of times.....

EDIT2: also, even though the building (eg, armory) is listed as a building that the city 'has' if you snake to it (possibly multiple times if you snake to multiple outposts, and the bonuses stack ) the effect is still only local to the outpost. Also stuff built after you snake has no effect, at all (I forgot to check that before my first edit)

Final note: Snaking only occurs (the outpost becomes included in the boarders of the city for the porposes of ZoC around the city, including the healing the land effect) if the outpost has at least one upgrade, or you start building an upgrade once snaking could occur, untill then the city won't expand it's boarders or put the graphical fence around the outpost.

I do not use Outposts, because it is to easy to capture and raze them.

This. This would make me use the outpost upgrades more

Why build an outpost when you could be building a city for the same cost ? Wait for the AI to build them and either flip them with your snaking cities or capture them...

Frogboy,

If I may suggest please consider creating a similar upgrade path for outposts like you already have for cities.

Picture this, you build an outpost and then upgrade it. the first upgrade would make you choose between 3 options.

Offensive: Arrow tower, Mage Tower, ect...

Support: increase movement, increase growth to towns, heal 2hp per turn to any friendly unit in range, ect...

Defensive tower: decrease enemy movement, reduce damage dealt by enemy, reduce attacks from wild life, ect... 

I usually use the hightower, and in later game I tend to get them all in the frontline areas/boarders.

harpo

Would be cool if they could act as fortresses as well, so you could garnisson troops there. I like the current upgrades, but they could've been extended upon with walls upgrades (defense bonuses for the garnisson) etc.

We don't all play with snaking cities. As your post tells; it's rather gamey.

I agree outposts are too fragile. Would be awesome if you could turn them into strongholds/fortresses with a garnisson. With a fortress in place you could also implement a rule that you needed to take out the fortress to pillage the ressources there.

Building fortresses should be a big investment, to prevent spamming and make it a hard decission, but worth it for some outposts arround important cities and arround important ressources.

I use them a lot. But perhaps it's because I like to play with Procipinee. In fact I do exactly the same as Draxim said:

I disagree with the idea of giving outposts their own build queue. In my opinion it makes a lot of sense that the city has to build outposts upgrades.

Outposts system is fine for me : I use them a lot and not only for ressources.

For example, if I plan the foundation of a new city on a spot that will become, strategically meaning, a "hot spot", I take the necessary time to build and upgrade (at least with high tower and armory) an outpost near the future city tile, and then I send a pioneer to settle the city (having around, of course, some troops to defend the outpost zone).

The only issue that I see with this outposts system is that the AI don't use outposts upgrades and this is a real weakness for AI players.

I also use the current outpost upgrades quite a lot, especially since I've stopped founding so many cities

It would be great, though, if the build outposts trait could be applied to another unit (e.g. scouts or engineers) to avoid the pioneer cost...

onkly used warden once before when played with lots of monsters around.

Would be more usefull to have heroes capable of initiating build que for them or even outposts themselves.

I use the upgrades fairly often.

I use stables along my major thoroughfare early, and slowly upgrade all of them to stables by end game.

When planning location of outpost, I usually plan ahead keeping in mind its ZOC with the high tower, depending on tough monster locations.

Use the attack/defense building on a more limited basis; for help taking down a near tough monster right on border of ZoC, and sometimes if I park an army in the outpost's ZoC near an enemy if the outpost is also a chokepoint.

Late game I'll usually get consulates up and running on a per city need.

Caltrops I very rarely build, although every now and then they are nice, when enemies are trying to run armies past my defending army, and defending army just doesn't have enough moves to get them all in one turn.

Wardens I build on a per case basis of near monster lairs, especially early game.

If outpost are removed, then there needs to be an alternative means of acquiring resources that are not located in settleable areas.