Quote Originally Posted by BillyKaplan View Post
Two things that would be amazing -
1. breaking workshops out of housing. FCs need to be affiliated with a certain GC, I'd like to see public, instanced workshops made available to FCs that hit a certain rank, instead of tying them to houses. Make the workshop log also tied to the FC rather than the house. Two things you get from this: a lot more FCs become viable as they no longer NEED a house, 2. you remove the incentive to owning a house from people who are in it just for the workshop.

2. FC merge. I can see why this doesn't exist as it's too much of a headache, but at the same time it can be very simplified and will give smaller FCs a chance to merge and grow without either FC losing things by virtue of abandoning their original FCs. And suddenly from needing two houses, you also need just the one.
I agree with point 1, that you should be able to have a free company workshop without housing. I don't know if that addresses the issue the OP brought up, though. If the workshop is still tied to the FC, I'm still going to hesitate to leave my FC (and lose all that work) to merge with someone else's. So the FC merge you propose would need to take workshops into account. I'm not sure of a clean way to do that, but that's a problem that needs to be solved.