Well, i think it would be good idea to allow more factions to be able to compete for northen towns. If factions more concentrate on one city, then maybe they will care more for it. Right now, all northen towns is a lot like one big battle, the one that wins owns all towns. Some ideas how to promote this situation:
A) What if factions would require more people to take towns for each town they own? For exemple if a faction owns one town, to take next town they need 8 people (+3), if they want a third town they will need 11 people and so on. That would make it harder to attack at nights with fewer people. In the end i think its logical that the more towns one faction controls the more people it needs.
B) Other could be to dissalow to hold some towns when you hold another, like, you cant hold Modoc and Klamath at the same time, or BH and Redding, or the Den and Gecko. (but this one i like less, its too extreme and leaves little to imagination).
C) What if towns instead of giving caps, cost caps? Crazy huh? Simple and true.
Some Experimental ideas:
C-2) Maybe if towns cost caps, the factions would need to do something in town, work on it somehow, to avoid the money loss, invest. Open a shop? Auction? Boxing Matches with betting? Take taxes for mining?
C-3) If a faction would like to roleplay raider factions they maybe should be able to do that, meaning, if vendor is killed, he can be looted for X amount of caps? Those caps are then subtracted from the loss of the owners, so if vendor is killed, the controlling faction has to pay it. If they dont manage to pay it, they loose control. And Vendor can be killed only between a specific time frame, like from 18 PM to 23:59 PM, otherwise he neither generates money or anything, he just dies like now without any loot, to give the fatction in control some chance to defend.
C-4) Once the controlling faction looses the control, they will have a dept to pay to the town if they want to regain control. Acually all factions have to do it, the deps is on the town, not in the faction, the town is bankrupt. However, Those that raided the town maybe should have a stash someplace, their raider base, which would be visible for one day(from 18 PM to 23:59 PM) after the raid. So, the owners of the town will have one day to hit back at raiders and get back the money, if raiders loose, they will loose their base, maybe to extreme but something like that.
Well, some ideas