I started a colony, and after it went through some troubles I finally got it built out to the point where I could hold out against any wave of raiders and had all the other factions bought off to 100 relation positive points . I had ten or twelve colonists, six miniguns and a good defence with a narrow sandbagged hallway for the raiders to come through, opening up in an area without cover, where I would catch them in a crossfire.
At this point two things caught my attention:
- Firstly, the one group with which I had hostile relations just kept pouring out wave after wave of raiders (at the normal intervals). This seems odd to me, since my colony only had twelve guys, and they were throwing thirty at me every now and then. I can believe they were a bigger group, but at some point it becomes ridiculous that they would have so many to spend.
- The second thing that I noticed/which happened was that visiting colonists from other colonies would leave in a badly timed way, getting caught in the crossfire.At this point they no longer wanted to communicate and so relations were lost.
I also pissed of another group to the point where I could no longer bring relations back up.
I would like to suggest that factions come and go as colonies come and go. I mean that they perish as colonies perish and new factions come forward. This makes it plausible that large groups keep appearing, since they come from new factions. It also makes it impossible for you to have good relations with everyone, since they might perish, and be replaced with a faction that no longer has good relations.
I would like to see it possible to have good relations with all factions, but not ad infinitum.
Maybe simulate the factions a bit: Their member numbers, food and other resources supply etc.
And ofc their relations to other factions and possible battles between the factions and requests for help to you.
So let's say: Your best buddy faction has 30 members, is good on food and everything else. Now they get attacked and raided by another faction. They loose 15 members and most of their supplies by the raid and are in an overall bad state. So it could happen that they all die without your help, because they live in an already dangerous area, need at least 10 ppl to keep their ppl save, need 10 ppl to take care of their food production (and I don't want to start about the ppl wich are needed for repairs etc.) and that full time. So they would slowly bleed out because of that and another faction could settle in this area or the raiders wich attacked them take their land and expand.
...It would take a lot of simulation, but it would improve the game and give you a REAL reason to send help to them and for them to be thankfull for your help. (Maybe something in this category: "helped us" / "gave us supplies" / "saved our lives" / "helped us in times of need" / "helped us greatly in our darkest hours" )