Faction bases close together, forming coherent boundaries

Faction bases not inside of boundaries considered scouting bases, smaller and with little supplies

Majority of bases outside of any faction boundaries should be considered looter colonies, unaffiliated with factions

Raids conducted by a faction should include what specific base they've come from

Factions should consider factors before raiding you: How much of a threat you are to them, how close you are, how much they have to lose,

how capable you've proven yourself to handle raids

Pawns from a raid should actually exist in the specific base they're said to have come from

If you win or lose a raid, you may have an idea that the base they came from is empty or has very little opposition, allowing easy retaliation

Factions should be able to move and merge bases if you've crippled one enough

When the map is generated, give each faction base a randomized, vague amount for how many supplies it has (food/medicine), the amount of weapons (and how good those weapons are), and how many pawns it'll have

These vague numbers should be cemented into actual items and pawns when you visit the base

The ability to scout bases out by visiting them, but not being spotted, should be a viable way to see what the bases contain. This already exists, but there's no reason to randomly scout bases since they're all more or less completely RNG

Being spotted should make your faction a bigger threat to the one you're invading

Factions shouldn't just be 'hostile' or 'friendly,' and instead, should only attack or perceive you as a threat dependent on your actions or relations other factions

Factions should specialize in certain areas. These areas can be broad, like 'weapons or armor,' or specific, like 'we only make chairs.'

A faction should be able to trade with you even if you're considered hostile, but the prices and amount of items they bring should be heavily dependent on that. This would give you incentive to friend specific factions.

Factions should trade with each other. If you entice a faction (or all of the factions on the map) that specialize in weapon manufacturing, other factions in the area should, as a result, lose access to higher quality weapons. This should happen if you trade with these factions often, or in major bulk, making them more likely to trade to you specifically instead of to others.

You should be able to sell items you create reliably at market value or higher

You can do that by advertising these items on the communications console. Other factions will decide if they need that item or not, and send caravans with money over to look at your selection

Special zoning tools should be given to zone out where these items will reside.

If they want something, you'll get a prompt saying what they want, how many of them, and what they will pay. If it's something that can have art, it'll include the specific names so you'll know what you're selling - in case you REALLY like something and only want to sell at very high prices.

The prices that factions offer for your items should ONLY be at market value or above. Depending on your relationship, or if if any other factions specialize in producing these items (would need to be connected to the faction revamp), they should offer to pay at higher prices

You should be able to counter-offer with custom prices for each item, or for all items clumped. They choose to accept depending on relations and how much they need the item.

Factions should have a trust system depending on how reliant you are on having the items you say you have in stock. If you advertise extremely rare items, and never have them, it should make them reluctant to trade with you. Same should apply for every item, but the rarity should impact how much trust gets lost. Vice versa, if you do have the item, it should make them likely to come back later or trust when you advertise new items.

Factions should request for special amounts of items by specific dates. (or in x amount of days.) These deals can be recurring or on-offs

They should pay extra for these deals, as well as pay even more if they require you to deliver it. Otherwise, they'll come to your base to pick the items up

Requested deals should be relevant to what you produce, with rare cases of it not being relevant, or if you don't specialize

If the faction revamp ideas are added, depending on what you're trading and how often, they should actually depend on your items. If you're trading them guns, they will be more well-armed. If you suddenly stop, perhaps they're less armed and easier to raid.

I had posted a block of text on a Reddit thread detailing the various changes I thought could be made to factions to finalize them for a 1.0 release, or as a content update later on. Right now, my feelings on factions is that they're a very unrealistic challenge, and oftentimes, facing off against raids doesn't feel good if I win or lose because the enemy is more or less invincible. I'll try to categorize my ideas. Keep in mind a lot of it may be incorrectly categorized, or relatively incoherent.. there's a lot to write.Problem: Factions don't feel tangible. Their resources and pawns are infinitely generated (or so it seems) until the faction is completely wiped off of the map. Faction interactions between the player's colony and other factions are nonexistant and the events that do happen feel like nothing more than simple RNG.The first step to fixing the problem is to give factions proper locations. Faction bases should be close together, forming coherent shapes of territory that they 'control' or have easy access to. (See:) Faction bases not inside of these groups should be considered scouting bases, with very little supplies, and not very many pawns. Pawns that do reside there should be relatively weak, equipped for things like scouting out other bases. Most bases that are placed randomly around the map should be considered generic, unaffiliated 'Looter' groups (or some other generic name like Scavengers or something). I'll talk about it later in the raiding section, but this would be a wise replacement for the majority of raids, as I don't find it realistic that a faction would constantly raid you when you keep beating their attempts. Instead, they get conducted by random groups that don't know any better.One of the major problems with raids is that they don't feel like a true threat because the pawns will keep randomly generating, they can travel insane distances, and the quality of their gear (so long as they aren't tribal, in which case, they'll just send millions of pawns) increases constantly. They usually don't feel like a realistic threat because their gear is either much better than yours, or much worse than yours. Finally, raids from the same factions over and over again remove the feeling that the factions have anything to lose. Fixes to all of these problems would be to not only associate raids with specific faction bases instead of just "the faction," but to scale the raids dependent on all factors considered. How much of a threat you are to their colonies, the gear you have, how capable you've proved yourself to handle raids, how many allies you have, and just how much they will have to lose themselves. (See:) I'll go over it in the next section, but giving raid parties a location would allow some possibilities for retaliation.One of the problems with faction raids is that when a faction raids you, the pawns just keep coming. Killing off some of their pawns doesn't make it feel like you're weakening their numbers. A good fix is to make it so when you are raided, the generated pawns will actually exist at the base it says they've come from. This will lead to some interesting opportunities. If you win a raid, you'll know that the base they came from will be weak - perhaps with only a few pawns that weren't sent on the raid, if not completely empty because they all went. Even if you lose, you might've harmed the pawns enough to make it viable for you to attack them back. Faction bases should be able to merge and move, too, which I'll go over later, to help mend broken bases - unless you finish them off.Factions at the moment never change, except for the occasional leader death. Unless you kill off every base, they're there to stay, their numbers infinite. The easiest way to make them come alive is to give each base randomized supply amounts, weapons and pawn counts. You should have the ability to visit these bases to scout them out, and unless one of them spots your pawns, you can get out without them knowing. If you are spotted, you should be considered a bigger threat. When you do this, it should cement these randomized amounts with actual items and pawns. (This is so when the map is generated, it won't take even longer.) Factions should have the stronger bases in the middle of their territory, with weaker ones near the outer edges of it.At the moment, you can only be 'hostile' or 'friendly' with factions. There is no other things you can be with factions. This 1 or 0 dictates if a faction will help you, curse at you on comms, or send caravans over to you. Instead, factions should have multiple relationships with eachother, as well as yourself, that could be beneficial. Certain factions should specialize in the creation of certain materials, foods or weaponry, broad or specific. This should somewhat depend on where they are located. These factions should be able to trade with you, even if they're hostile with you, unless you're really hostile with them, and they perceive you as an immediate threat. Until then, prices depend on your relations, and the amount of goods they offer should depend on relations. These factions should trade with eachother, too. While these trades don't need to constantly be happening, if you interrupt or 'steal' a specific faction from trading with others, the goods they supply should appear less often in the other faction's inventories. Say a faction specialized in the creation of weaponry and armor, and you entice them by offering to pay high or pay in bulk. They then trade with you more exclusively, and other factions should have less weapons and armor. Unfortunately, specialization can't really happen unless Rimworld contains more 'stuff,' which I'll cover extremely briefly last.Problem: You can never make a profit on the things you sell. No matter what, you're always going to be selling at a loss, compared to the normal market price.Just a quick suggestion, which doesn't have to be part of the major faction revamp, but you should have options to specialize and produce your own product that other factions will want and trade you for at a higher (or equivalent) price of their market value. This should only happen if you consistently produce whatever it is, and other factions know you do. (That could be a possible addition of the communications console, the ability to advertise that you're selling specific items. Other factions will send over caravans to check out your selection, as designated in special zones, and offer to purchase at prices above or at market value (which you can then decline or accept, or counter-offer, but what they pay will depend on your relationship.)) The factions that trade can be hostile, but not too hostile. Otherwise, they will only trade if they do not perceive you as a threat. Since you can advertise items, you should be able to select what factions you're advertising to (or all of them), and factions should have trust values in the event that they get there and the items aren't up to the quality that you said that you had them in, or you never have a lot of the product available. (Examples: A faction wants superior chairs but you never have one that's superior or above in stock when they arrive, despite saying you did. A faction wants 20 regular medicines, and you advertised that you had high quantities of it.)Factions should be able to establish trade deals with you. They should request specific amounts of items at specific times, and they will pay you large sums if you have it on time. They should pay even more if they require you to actually deliver it, too. (Otherwise, they'll come to your base to get it.) Generally, these deals should be relevant to the items you're producing, but sometimes they might ask for special cases. Depending on the items, it should even influence what that faction has. If you make guns, that faction should have the guns you give them.Right now this system "exists" but seems very random, never recurring, and always requires you to deliver. They also almost never seem worth it, as they underpay with items that aren't valuable. They should, instead, almost always offer silver, and their offer should always be worth more than what the market price for the amount of items is.Problem: Loading screens. Long loading screens!Simple idea. Just make it so you can see each individual cell load in on the map, perhaps even blinking when it appears. This could be a laggy process, but it would make the game feel more polished. Also it's boring staring at a loading screen.Problem: There's almost no variety in the amount of furniture or joy items Rimworld contains.Instead of relying on mods, I really think that vanilla Rimworld should contain tons of items to diversify bases. I can't imagine adding new furniture is too hard to add, other than making art for it. I don't have any specific ideas, but I think it should be said anyway, especially if I'm going to be discussing options to 'specialize' in things for trade.Welp, that's all that I can think of at the moment. I wrote this all in one go! Please add or comment on these ideas, or even add new ones. I'll see if I can edit this post with these additions or changes in a way that looks coherent so people can see these ideas develop as it gets discussed.