Ah yes, I remember the original Outpost. My father bought it on floppies back in around 1994/1995. When I finally played, it definitely had bugs and was missing features. I remember when I was first playing it, I thought I was playing poorly leading to a ghost town. Turns out others suffered the same problems where their colonies would die in about 100 turns at least. Rebel colony never worked either.
If your colony was dying after 100 turns that was on you; usually, that's from failure to manage resources well enough. You have to keep mining aggressively, build a SPEW, and drive your research towards nanotechnology (eventually) in anticipation of the day all your mines run dry.
The rebel colony on the other hand was never put together properly; the computer would just randomly stick buildings together in ways that made no sense.
As for Outpost 2, it's pretty good though definitely real-time. You can actually play it without any combat through the colony games. However, it's even challenging due to having to worry about disaster such as vortexes (tornadoes), meteors, and the dreaded lava (which will catch you unprepared).
If you want to try Outpost 2 on a modern system, feel free to grab it from here: http://outpost2.net/outpost2.php
And no, I'm not trying to encourage piracy. There hasn't been any DMCA takedown to my knowledge on this website. I still own the original CD (backed up as an ISO at some point) to this day, but do download from that site to make it run on modern OSes.