Perfect faction balance is 33.3333% of all server population. But you need to level up and do some quests before you can join one of 3 factions, so there will always be some new no faction players. And the perfect balance will go something like this (30/30/30/10-no faction). You can take 30% as a balance point and add faction buff/debuff system based on it.
Example of misbalance situation:
|Factions|Balance point|Current status|Misbalance|Experience gain buff/debuff x2 (optional multiplier)|Experience needed for upgrading town projects x3 (optional)|
|1| 30% 40% +10% -20% +30%
|2| 30% 25% -5% +10% -15%
|3| 30% 27% -3% +6% -9%
|No faction| 10% 8%
Faction 1 and faction 2 will have 30% experience difference and 45% town projects experience difference.
Town boards are connected to the city - if it’s a faction-1 city they will get a debuff in +% to how much experience they need to generate to get their projects done. All players from any faction will get the same amount of exp as usual for the quests; just the overall amount will be increased for faction-1 town boards. For example if a town project needs 100.000 exp to be generated - for faction-1 it will become 130.000, not so much but at least something.
This way outnumbered faction players will level up faster and develop their cities faster(24 hours limit?)/easier. It can bring some fair balance and help to avoid such situations when players massively recruiting new players to join only one faction. Make this system open and clear for new players and faction balance visible all the time (on the screen or in the character menu). Factions will be able to decide themselves – either, they want more players and ready to have faction debuff, or they want to stay close to neutral balance and have as less debuff as possible. Moreover, even if some factions are outnumbered by some reason – they will level up faster than other factions.
There are several ways how to implement this system:
- Experience buff/debuff will influence all aspects of the game including town projects quests from town boards (no need of town board exp changes ot be done separately)
- Experience buff/debuff will influence all aspects of the game EXCEPT town board quests. And town board exp will be counted separately for each faction (100.000 → 130.000 from example)
- Experience buff/debuff will influence all aspects of the game. And town board exp will be counted separately for each faction (100.000 → 130.000 from example). In this case faction-1 will get -20% exp debuff and also +30% exp needed for town projects.