New uses for abandoned cities.

I think DuckofNormandy hit the nail on the head.  That's exactly what I was thinking as I read through this thread.  I agree that something should be done about abandoned cities and there are a lot of good ideas, but Duck's is the best solution imo.  Abandoned cities could be taken over by an NPC faction, but the city would not develop and would have a static troop count.  Players could attack the towns to drive out the inhabitants and for their efforts maybe gain some small reward in addition to XP for defeating the occupying army.  Perhaps they would additionally take a small portion of the resources that an abandoned city currently produces (this is not anything more than what already happens today).

Ulfhedinn wrote: Allied player cities are not necessarily better. If you are in an alliance and you attack an aligned player city you incur the wrath of the full alliance. If you attack an npc city the immediate repercussion are inconsequential although if continued could be very sever.   The overpopulation concern could be easily taken care of  by limiting the amount of npc cities per 50x50 map square using a simple algorithm.  The npc cities would add many things that you could not normally do with allied players. For instance you cannot consistently buy out your neighbors plate armor stock for say, 800 basic resource per unit. Neither can you have all of your player allies send every soldier to break their backs on your enemies walls just because you just don`t like the guy, without having it traced back to you because it is technically an npc faction attack. Nor can you buy  mercenary troops of a different race from player cities. The focus of my post was to impart upon the developers fresh ideas to give existing players more of a novel gaming experience with depth and an added layer of strategy rather than just quantity of players. This is something lacking in most free online games. Illyriad has surpassed many of them so far and with the upcoming updates I have seen it looks like it will surpass many more.

Yeh, sorry if I sounded hostile, was late and you have a really long post. Wait... that sounds wrong.
I'm not belittling you or your idea, its just most of what I read seemed to me like having a player-friendly and predictable automated ally/foe. Maybe not everyone is as lucky as me, but my neighbor was ridiculously friendly, sending mountains of resources to me for nothing, so sometimes a player is a lot better too.
I like the idea of bribing or using NPCs as vassals to carry out attacks/reinforce etc, but having them act independantly is the line for me. I just really don't see the point when the server becomes more populated to have randomly roaming and attacking groups of NPCs when you will have more than your fair share of players to deal with.

I should mention that we're probably not going to be repurposing abandoned cities for NPC use and AI city building, but the other thoughts on Faction standing, hiring mercenaries etc is all good.

Don't like this at all. We've already got NPC factions.

I don't really get the point of this to be honest. Pretty much all I read (sorry tl;dr) is asking for abandoned cities to become automated so that they act like real players. A real player would be better. This game is brand new, as in the doctor has barely delivered it and it has yet to be spanked on the ass and start crying. Once the server is nicely populated all of this would be obsolete, as real players in real alliances would behave in the same way, but be much more interactive. Plus, if they are to be constantly growing and settling, NPC factions and cities would eventually fill up the map, and I'm thinking the game would end up fairly unplayable.