I completly agree with needing more life in cities. Adding roaming npcs is a very good idea, and with shops and closing times they could easily get around having to close shops by simply having another npc take over the store at night. So there would a npc for night shift and day shift. As for the conquest thing, I have little faith that something like that would work right now in the game just because of how bad the areas are spaced. For instanced your never really a zone away from another town ( like how LL connects right to thalan), there is no area between the starting zones for most cities. So it be hard to take an area where the city is in for another city(although in FFXI I was apart of an LS that took a week of killing in ronfaure to take it for bastok for some lols and disrespecting). I guess we could do it on a camp by camp bais though.