Overhaul to Faction System

It's fairly common knowledge that the main point of multiplayer in Space Engineers (or pretty much any game) is the fact that you get to play both with and against other players, which massively diversifies the survival experience and adds a new dynamic to trying to keep things running. Many players will respond to this by banding into factions, but I've found, from my experience on both Medieval Engineers and Space Engineers that the faction system in Space Engineers is fairly lacking - in my opinion, at least - and that a lot more could be done to improve it and make it more like the promotional trailers for the game that you see in the loading screens and backgrounds.

While the faction system functions fine as a sort of rudimentary system to let you band together with friends, it does not work as a system to establish full factions with, like it did with Medieval Engineers. In Medieval Engineers, anyone who played it would remember that you were able to create a limited amount of roles and assign specific permissions to each one of these. I feel that Space Engineers most definitely needs a system like this, perhaps more than ME did with its houses.

I'm aware that some people may ask 'why do we need this', so allow me to explain. At the moment, when you join a faction, you have only three roles - Founder, Leader and Member. Member grants you access to faction items that are shared with you, and nothing more. Founder and Leader are practically identical and let you run the faction. The problem is that there is no way to divide this down more, or add stuff in between, other than to use third party apps like Discord to specialise you, and even then you need someone who has the Leader/Founder role in game to be able to actually exert anything meaningfully. The way this functions in itself means you can only have people you trust in your factions, not random players, which sort of means that your game can never really live up to the levels that you see in all of the old SE promotional videos.

What I suggest is done is that you get an arbitrary amount of roles you can make - say, up to 10 - and each one has a settings screen where you can add and remove specific permissions. So, if I want to create a 'recruit' role for people who I have just recruited that I do not know or trust yet, I can set them to be able to use our medbays, but they cannot access our cargo containers, weapons, safezones, or cockpits when they spawn in. And then if I had a steady income of credits for the faction via the economy system, I can make an accountant role that has the ability to access and transfer faction funds, letting me send them to other players, but they cannot add or remove people from the faction or anything, which would also limit the damage of a role abuser.

Here are some potential permissions (non-exhaustive list, of course - these are all just ideas) I've come up with, including the above:

• Ability to spawn at medbays / survival kits
• Ability to access inventories / use refineries / use assemblers
• Ability to use control panels
• Ability to use seats and/or weapons
• Ability to distribute credits / funds to players below your rank / role
• Ability to add / remove (kick) players from the faction
• Ability to change the ranks of players below your rank (promote / demote them)
• Ability to make temporary 'announcements' or 'bulletins' on a revamped faction screen that opens each time you spawn at a faction base, or log in in a faction cryopod / bed, and can be viewed by opening up the factions tab, which shows your faction bulletin / announcements
• Ability to edit the icon of the faction
• Ability to change the name of the faction
• Ability to change relations with other factions
• Ability to add new ranks / remove existing ranks below your rank
• Ability to change the order of ranks below your rank

I have some other features that I feel are interested and can further add to the experience alongside this, but these are just examples of what faction play could look like. None of these are truly part of my suggestion, but just to give an idea of what sort of gameplay or idea I'm going for with this suggestion.

Here they are:

• Each faction role could have a unique tag that displays at the end of the name, but only for other faction members, that uniquely identifies their rank. For example, if I named a rank 'Captain', I can give it the tag 'CPT', and a player with it would be called [ABC] Player (CPT)
• Factions can have increased amounts of relations with each other. Everyone should start as neutral with each other, but they can set their relations on a scale - 'Hostile [war], Rival, Neutral, Friendly, Ally' which each will come with different abilities and changes. Setting someone as Hostile or Rival could automatically deny them access to all of your items, even if they are set to share with all, and Hostiles will always be targeted by online turrets, whereas Rivals will not be. Neutrals are the same as they are right now, while Allies have access to your safezones (but not your inventories) and can never be shot at. To change relations to Ally or Hostile, a request must be sent that someone with relations perms can accept or deny. If relations are changed to hostile or ally, everyone online in both factions is notified of it, and it takes an hour before it comes into (or out of) effect.
• Factions could have a specific type of safezone that they can deploy if they have over a certain number of players, which requires an increased number of zone chips to upkeep and much more resources to use in the first place which lets them use their main base as an NPC station. Only one can be placed by each faction, and they cannot be placed within, say, 1,000km of each other, and can only be placed in space. When at least three faction members are online (or no faction member has been online for at least a week), the safezone becomes 'vulnerable', indicated by a change in texture, and an enemy faction can coordinate to attack it to raid the base. This only happens when they are at war. Obviously, this is just a potential idea of something that can be done on top of it, but I wouldn't expect a complicated system like this - the point is that this is just an example of the huge variety of things that can be done to diversify faction play.

As you can see, I feel that a lot more could be done than what is currently done with Space Engineers factions, and while it may be difficult to implement due to this being old code, I do also think that this is definitely a vital feature, and worthy of its own major update in itself. It could be paired with an update to AI factions to improve the vanilla PvE aspect of the game, which the recent AI update is going to definitely help with, and could maybe make AI factions more like actual AI rather than just a player faction with fake members running scripts, and functioning the same way as an actual player faction.

Anyway, I want to clarify at the end here that everything listed anywhere above is just examples and ideas of how this could be implemented, not an actual part of the suggestion. I only want to see an improvement to how player factions are, primarily in terms of permissions and roles, and whatever form this may come about in doesn't matter to me, so long as it still achieves a similar effect. I just want improved faction play, or at least some sort of integration that a modder could use to create a factions mod that achieves this effect anyway, because at the moment I'm being told that it's simply not possible.

Just think about the trailer videos, and how your average Space Engineers faction gameplay could look like that, rather than one on one encounters between random players - huge battles between two large factions going to war with each other to kick the other out of a region (no, I do not want a territory system, that would be too janky and probably wouldn't work). A slight exaggeration, of course, but the idea gets across.