Setting:
Since there are 3 different factions it would be nice to make use of that setting as mentioned several times.
a) Home islands are invaded by the two hostile factions and are at war. The state of war is dynamically defined by agressing that faction the most which is dominating the 2 others factored by values coming from the most progressed/RE'd/produced robot families on the market and the most used by players. Intensity of these NPC wars varies according to that.
b) Attacking robots of the same family as oneself is results in faction standing loss, though it would be the easiest since the 2 other factions join in on these battles.
This would require the faction standing to have an impact on the difficulty of PVE fights - the better a standing is - the lesser the NPC of that family will engange you. If you engange him, its powers are dimished by your faction standing - but your faction standing would be reduced quickly.
If you wouldnt attack your family - it would automatically boost your PVE chances against the other 2 families, since they are at war. But you would need to find another player from another faction to kill those bots for you, you need most.
This way the faction standing is also something usefull in PvP situations since one could hide in a PVE family type spawn.
c) Spawns only spawn 1 faction type. If this particular spawn isnt being farmed(for missions or loot) in a certain ratio, the spawn will grow over several days. When a certain amount is reached - the double or triple sized group of bots start roaming as a group aiming at primnarily at the hostile NPC faction(shown above) - but also attack players depending on faction standing.
There would be some fix roaming routes to hostile NPC spawns - but also the most used paths are being frequented.
Spawns that grow according to above - have the possibility to breed a boss type NPC.
d) As soon as there are player made assets on alphas (could be instanced entry points to not cover the alphas totally accessible for Corps with an alliance feature(to be developed)) roaming NPC would attack those according to their family status type. All those housings would have an indicator defined by its members families. The higher that indicator points to a certain family, the more likely the housing will be attacked by hostile roaming NPC as described above.
These ideas just need evaluation of the most used paths(already there), evaluation of the most used/advanced robot family(easy to do via the market and player origins) and evaluation of the housing indicator(factored by its members).
The AI changes needed are minor ones, since each action on its own isnt complex. Same with the faction standing influencing the possibility of being attacked or indirectly supported. Overall its a: "if x > then" - its thecomplexity and diversity of players which makes this system 'seem' unpredictable or non-linear - but its not of course.
Complexity:
Speaking of AI - some minor changes in small PVE encounters would be nice, without having to re-build logics which is a hard task and still easy to exploit. Developing advanced AI is a profession and project for itself - but some minor, rather random events like extending the agression range or making NPC follow a player for longer distances then normal, could add a tiny bit of spice.
Features:
I'd like to see more features concerning player/NPC interaction.
-make scanning an NPC advance your scientific progress a bit(if your an RE guy)
-make NPC corpses hackable yielding a better kernel result or with a chance of a higher tiered item as normally
-implement hacking those corpses as minigames letting you not see what happens aroubnd you while doing it. If you trie too long, other NPC might spawn and already attack you, while your hacking