On server Brazir we are caught in a cycle of upgrading a city just to have it demoted directly after by invasions. Teams are giving away territories due to upkeep and upgrade cost.
We own Monarchs Bluff and Ebonscale. Monarch makes 30-40k gold a week tops with extremely low taxes, and even less if I raise them. Ebonscale makes nothing as of now but its expected. We can not afford to upgrade stations daily and pay upkeep. If we do not upgrade stations daily, we are reset to t1 by unbeatable invasions. I understand other servers can win invasions, however our low population server simply cant. It has been a brutal process of getting t5 for a day and then waking up to it being gone again, every day.
Companies should receive the housing tax, currently we are not receiving and taxes from houses being owned in our territories.
How often invasions occur should be scaled off the number of level 55+ on a server.
Upkeep taxes for regions should scale off both how many tiers the city has been upgraded, but also scaled based on how many players a faction has.
This games mechanics is brutal for factions with less than 300 players, and there should be some kind of mechanic added to at least help the smaller factions not have to generate ridiculous amounts of gold to keep afloat.
There should be a way to exclude players from faction bonuses also. If a player is actively working against a faction while being in that faction, they should receive some kind of repercussions. Im not sure what that looks like, but there are a lot of players effectively stuck on factions for 100 more days and are doing their best to get into wars and throw, I can see that being part of the game, BUT they should reap the benefits of the team they are handicapping.
I have played 310 hours total now, so the following comes only from MY perspective on server brazir.
Green buys in green territories, purple in purple, and yellow in yellow. This makes perfect sense as it helps drive their factions upgrades. However it becomes a pretty rough obstacle to overcome when one faction out numbers the other two factions combined. I am not sure what can be done to fix this issue other than giving incentives to be on the smallest team at the time to encourage more players to join that faction. Im sure this is just me complaining, but it would be amazing to see in game mechanics to help both low population servers as a whole, and low population factions be able to compete.