Question Is there any way to send settlers/civilians from an Outpost to a Vassal or Settlement?

[Kevlin Tallfellow]

So when you start up a new game of Conqueror, and you have settlements pre-built and pre-populated, it's very likely that any place you choose to make an outpost is going to have a pre-existing population. If you are a Liberator, you may not want to make a new outpost with captives, you may just want to make a new outpost in a place that already has a population. However, having civilians outnumber warriors in an outpost is terrible for morale in that outpost, and several of the ROTC city plans have jobs that are not associated with an actual city plot, so you end up with a lot of civilians working jobs that don't actually provide any W/R/E, while they still consume rations to do so and wreck your morale in the process.

I want to send some civilians away from the outpost, to improve morale and make room for more soldiers, but when I try to move them, the only options available are other outposts, who are just as likely to already have civilians that they don't want. I want to send these people to vassals, or just regular settlements, where they can be more productive and not live in the somewhat oppressive environment of a military outpost, but that doesn't seem to be possible.

In a nutshell, I need these people gone from outposts, but I'm not too keen on executing them in the public square, I can't send them to a place where I actually need them to be, and they won't just up and leave on their own.

Any ideas, besides opening the console and outright removing them from the game?

 

[bullyrook]

You've found the wrinkle. This of course is mostly a concern for Liberators.

Anyone stationed at an Outpost can only be moved to another Outpost (the exception being Guards.) Anyone stationed at a Vassal can be moved to a normal Settlement and vice versa.

A conqueror would have to have slaughtered any existing population to establish an Outpost and would not have to deal with the problem you face.

Keep in mind (always) that Conqueror is a work in progress and the Liberator side even more so. But it is clearly bent towards the Conqueror (hence the name) side of things atm. We are all still blazing the trails here.

One option is to change the mechanics for the white hats. The other is to accept the problem that playing as a Liberator presents and find a solution within the current mechanics.

If you "liberate" a prebuilt CP or populated settlement, and then make it an Outpost, you have precisely the problem you describe: a number of civilians living in your outpost throwing a wrench in your morale and taking up space better used by actual recruits.

If you were able to have/get twice as many warriors than the civilian/other roles population this wouldn't be a problem at all. Your morale ratio would be right. But if you have a CP with 15 Civilians, that requires at least 30 Warriors. 45 settlers in any one settlement makes for less than optimal game play.

But even when playing as a raider, making a settlement with lots of production plots/ residential plots into an Outpost doesn't make much sense.

What is an Outpost? I mean from the perspective of the game mechanics, what exactly is the purpose of an Outpost? First of all, it's a place to get and keep your warriors. Secondly, it is a place to produce and export Control. Vassals should provide w/r/e production in return for the Control provided by Outposts. Production for Security; Security for Production. This is the symbiotic relationship between the vassals and outposts.

If I planned my Liberator play with this wrinkle in mind, I'd only establish Liberator Outposts in empty settlements. (If prebuilding, I'd leave a strategic number of settlements unbuilt and thus available to be made outposts without civilians).

This doesn't fix your current problem, however.

What if you redeployed all these useless eater civilians to just one Outpost? An outpost that was built just for them so to speak. If you built a Civilian only outpost, what would it look like?

edit: What would a useful Civilian only outpost look like?

 

[Irealys]

edit: What would a useful Civilian only outpost look like?

Depends if the IDEK Logistics station is an option or not in your hypothetical. Correct me if I’m wrong since I’ve failed to make an outpost work up to now but wouldn’t civilians work plots and produce extra like any settlement? Couldn’t it then use used as an intensive production of X (scrap, water, food and whatnot) regardless of outpost status? Like I’m using Abernathy to overproduce food for other settlements where I barely grow anything?

 

[bullyrook]

Couldn’t it then use used as an intensive production of X (scrap, water, food and whatnot) regardless of outpost status? Like I’m using Abernathy to overproduce food for other settlements where I barely grow anything?

Yes, but outposts present issues that regular settlements don't suffer. Issues of morale, control, and w/r/e production. These have to be addressed or deliberately ignored. If the civilians in Civ Only Outpost are working w/r/e plots you've got one set of benefits/problems. If they are all working vanilla objects, you've another set. Mix and match for even more fun.

Civ Only Outpost would give Kevin Kevlin a place to send all his unwanted Outpost Civilians. So that's a plus, even if it was just a dumping ground. But it seems to me there must be some way to make it a productive cog while minimizing friction in your overall machine.

 

[Kevlin Tallfellow]

The way this went down for me, Outpost Z was pre-built and pre-populated, and I liberated it and turned it into an outpost. I did this because Tenpines was too far away from Red Rocket to do a vassal mission from the RR outpost, so I needed another outpost further east.

The ROTC city plan for Outpost Z has several blue-man work stations in it, as the city plan is largely cobbled together from bits and pieces of junk structures. Since these aren't actual plots, they don't do anything to increase W/R/E and you can't just change them to something you need, but all of the civilians working in them still take up the 10 rations each, so you end up with almost no net gain from those workers and a HUGE net loss on rations. After I got Tenpines, I tried taking down the outpost at OZ and turning it back into a regular settlement. The new problem was, when it asked me where to send my soldiers, I chose the RR outpost, and it sent about a dozen civilians to the RR outpost. Since RR was also an outpost, they didn't need any civs there either, so the problem just moved from one outpost to another, while remaining within the W/R/E system. I thought only soldiers were supposed to be transferred in this manner? Aren't the civilians supposed to stay in the settlement after you tear down the outpost?

Since I was unable to move any of these people to anything other than an outpost, I started looking for other ways to deal with the problem. I didn't want to just start killing people to make them go away, because then you're not liberating anymore. I wasn't about to have a dozen civilians in an outpost with a 2:1 warrior:civilian ratio, because my rations were falling short due to the high number of civilians, preventing any new recruits from showing up, let alone *dozens* of new recruits. Waiting around for them to simply choose to leave wasn't much of an option, either. I ended up turning OZ back into an outpost, and then sending as many civilians as possible back there, as sort of a refugee camp. I still had some people left at RR when OZ ceased to show up on the list for moving people.

This still didn't solve the problem, as these civilians were still within the Conqueror system using up loads of rations without producing anything useful in return. However, since I had essentially withdrawn from OZ, the control and defenses there were virtually nil, and I figured that someone would take it over soon enough, relieving me of my burden. This is when they actually *did* choose to leave, and OZ stopped being allied to me of its' own volition, causing my rations to skyrocket to a triple-digit surplus. I'm back on track now, but somehow those two dozen civilians are going to have to figure out how to feed everyone from those four mutfruit bushes in the lone ag plot I left behind...

This whole fiasco made me *really* want to just turn off the soldier needs system.

I would say that in it's current state, it is essentially impossible to be successful as a liberator with pre-built cities in all of the settlements (excluding the suggested quest-related settlements). You will need to make new outposts as you go along, to push your control out to encompass new settlements. With pre-built settlements, you are virtually guaranteed to be forced into making an outpost in a place that already has a sizeable civilian population that you generally cannot put to use within your outposts and cannot move to anything *other* than an outpost, leaving only the most grim of options when faced with a civilian population too large for your rations to support. For conquerors, this would be simple enough to deal with by taking captives who use half the rations, or just killing the surplus population. For liberators, on the other hand, you'd have to basically spam farms to keep everyone rationed, while you waited for all those farms to level up and produce an actual surplus of rations to allow any recruitment to take place.

Liberators definitely need some help with *civil* civilian population management in regards to pre-built pre-populated outposts. Until then, I would agree that it would be strongly advised for liberators to intentionally leave several of the settlements in their default, unpopulated state, and to also be mindful of the non-plot-related work included in many of the city plans that would prevent proper W/R/E management in those cities.

 

[bullyrook]

Great post @Kevlin Tallfellow

 

[Kevlin Tallfellow]

What if you redeployed all these useless eater civilians to just one Outpost? An outpost that was built just for them so to speak. If you built a Civilian only outpost, what would it look like?

edit: What would a useful Civilian only outpost look like?

Having had some sleep, I was thinking about this as well.

Is it only food production that is halved in outposts?

As for W/R/E, outposts don't get the bonus production that vassals get, so plots in outposts that are manned by anything other than a worker recruit (who uses 10W/10R/0E) would not be nearly as productive as the same plot in a vassal, correct?

If I were to build an outpost focused on civilian population, in the current state of things, it would probably be full of industrial plots and advanced industrial plots (that provide loads of stuff outside of W/R/E), with a full complement of commercial plots for utility's sake (a doctor who can treat rads and illness, at the very least, which requires an NPC who actually has the doctor dialogue available). My personal preference would probably be to use mytigio's industrial city pack to start cranking out a robot army, if I felt like I had W/R/E stable enough to handle the ration requirements of a civilian population.

Ironically, civilians *can* work martial plots in an outpost, while they are restricted from doing so in vassals unless you change that setting in the options. So a civilian outpost could also have several martial plots being manned by civilians to provide defense and some of the other outpost benefits, but civilians do not provide any control in this manner, so you're still losing 10R for each man and having nothing put back into the W/R/E system (which I just decided to start calling the W/R/E/C system, because that's what it tends to do to my games). For example, having a civilian recruiter might be worth the 10R if it means having one more warrior available for an assault, but that's assuming that the benefits of outpost martial plots are in effect while being manned by civilians (recruiter, armory, hospital, scavenger, etc.). Are these bonuses still in effect if a martial plot in an outpost is being manned by anything other than a warrior/guard?

I actually did have a use for a *few* civilians in my outpost. I wasn't using the city plan for Red Rocket, because I didn't want to lose immediate access to all of the crafting stations there, and it's generally a bad idea to have three sim settlement city plans all loading into the game at once due to proximity (in this case, Sanctuary, Red Rocket, and Abernathy Farm). I chose to use this freedom to plant a whole lot of crops to feed adhesive production, but apparently all those plants need someone to actually be working them to make them grow any food (how did these plants ever survive without people around?), so having a couple of extra bodies around to do that would actually be useful to me. However, the cost in rations for this activity would have to be carefully considered, and I would strongly advise using the workshop holotape or MCM to increase the number of workable crops per person to something *far* higher than 6. You know, like 30, because surely there are *some* people out there who can keep more than 6 plants alive at once, right?

In the end, though, an outpost full of civilians will have terrible morale because of the ratio to soldiers (if you even have any soldiers at such an outpost), so you'd end up having to sink even more rations into people working recreational plots to make the place actually productive, and there's still the issue of control. You'd likely need *another* outpost full of warriors sending patrols to the first outpost just to keep them from leaving you or getting raided all the time. This sort of thing would really not even be possible until you've become well-established in the region, and have stabilized your W/R/E/C.

 

[Kevlin Tallfellow]

As a side note, I would also bring to Kinggath's attention the issue of non-plot work stations in city plans going forward with Conqueror, as they are fundamentally incompatible.

It seems that currently, W/R/E/C is so fragile that it cannot effectively support anything outside of itself, so losing rations on population that put nothing back into it is a problem that snowballs very easily for liberators who can (and probably will) find themselves with increasing civilian populations and no "moral" way to deal with them. Refugee crisis, indeed.