Faction city/base types - community driven content with rewards!

[Anxarcule]

Having just finished an awesome game on A16, I tried my hand a bit at raiding and found that by the time I did so I was able to dominate each outpost for not much material gain - understandable given that this is a brand new feature.  I have a few ideas I thought would be a great way to flesh out this feature as well as bring in the community to help with a content creation via a contest of sorts.

Currently we have 3 faction types - tribals, civilized folks, and pirates.  To start with, I would suggest expanding on this by adding wealth level for non-tribals.

• Base faction types would be Tribal, Outlander Normal, Outlander Wealthy, Pirate Normal, Pirate Wealthy
• Upon game start there would be more than the 5 factions - I was thinking even something like 7 or so factions (depending on world size)
• Peppered around the map would be the bases/outposts of each faction, but instead of every outpost being the same there will be different types - settlement, village, city (pirate equivalent would be raiding camp, outpost, capital base), with the bigger types being less common.  Of course each of those types would have a unique (or one of several unique) layouts... created by the community!

Creating different variations for each base type and for each wealth level (a wealthy pirate base would have much better loot/defenses/infrastructure than a normal pirate base), would be an arduous task for the developers to do by themselves especially with what I imagine to be a very healthy backlog... so why not run a community contest that will challenge the community members to do this exact thing?  Building bases is one of the most fun things that you can do, and I personally would LOVE to design an enemy base that would be very challenging to take over.  From some of the bases I've seen posted here and on steam we have some incredibly creative people here too who would make some intricate bases fitting with the theme of the faction.  Imagine a tribal base with a 40 tamed muffalos, a plethora of cropland, and scattered smaller dwellings... or an outlander town with paved roads, a central market hub, and furnished dwellings.... or a pirate stronghold deep in a mountain, with hoards of silver, a supply of hi-tech weapons, a handful of prisoners, and a killbox of their own...

Provided Tynan is on board, I would propose a community challenge to design each type of base for different factions that can be submitted for peer-review/voting and ultimately decided by Tynan on what makes it into the final game.  Rewards can be given to the winners that would be similar to the current DLCs (name a colonist, name a pirate king, etc.).

There would have to be some kind of ground rules involved with creating bases so they don't become too overboard, but that is beyond the scope of this suggestion - I just wanted to put this out there.  For further storyline events, I could even see a rumour of a legendary piece of equipment being held in specific base (similar to the quest to get across the world to an abandoned ship)... maybe  even a mechanoid factory!  But that is putting the cart before the horse