Sounds like a great idea. I’m not sure how many suggestions I can offer, as I’m not terribly familiar with the the genre of game under discussion. From what I can see, base building games are mostly video games like Fallout, etc.

You have a home base/fort etc.
You leave it to gather supplies, do missions etc and come back to your home base/fort.
You might have to defend your home base/fort.
Sounds like this is going to be cooperative, not competitive

(sorry of any of this is super-obvious, I’m trying to get a baseline here).

I also see where you have six areas “with positives and negatives” but not all of them have negatives?

Dungeon – Treasure / Threat
Tavern – Happiness / Loss of treasure
Kitchen – Food
River – Water
Forest – Wood
Market – Merchants

So how about:

* Dungeon – Treasure / Threat (find a treasure or a monster emerges to threaten the group)

* Tavern – Happiness / Loss of treasure (generate happiness or violence breaks out that damages the tavern)

* Kitchen – Food / Famine (good feasts for everyone, or vermin get into the larders and spoil the food)

* River – Water / Flood (steady current provides sanitation, clean drinking water, and power via waterwheel, or floods and damages crops and waterwheel).

* Forest – Wood / wildfire or bandits (good resources and source of both wood and game.  Or … bandits infest your woods, and a wildfire breaks out).

* Market – Merchants / Mafia (steady, lawful commerce generates tax revenue for your castle, or a criminal element /  gang takes root and starts corrupting, intimidating, extorting merchants, they start leaving, business declines).

How to engage the community 

Just some very basic ideas (again, I don’t know the mechanics of the game too well so none of this might apply) …

The community could represent the peasants / residents / merchants / guilds of this little fiefdom.  I really like @davehawes idea of presenting some kind of “menu” of 5-6 bonuses at the beginning of the week, the one that gets the most +1s at the end of the week applies.

Maybe a menu of negatives as well – so the community gets a chance to “screw” with the team a little.  🙂

Maybe each team member should be “in charge” of a cetrain area of the tower, like Justin in charge of the dungeon, John in charge of the forest, etc.  That way community members could try and vote for (or against) certain people (you want to mess with John, vote for the hazard: “bandits in the forest.”

OR …

Set up a little forum thread for the game, where community members could narratively describe certain bonuses of their own, specifying which category to which they would apply.  Say I wanted to help John in the forest, I could write a little snippet about a militia I’m trying to create to help against bandits on the forest trails.   Say I wanted to hinder Warren in the kitchen, I could write a little story about how “Oriskany the disgruntled cook” releases a swarm of rats in his ANZAC biscuits (and then the community lynches me, I’m sure).  Who doesn’t like playing the villain?  🙂 🙂 🙂

One entry per week is selected to apply, either through popular vote in the community (+1s) or voted on by the office team, announced in the weekly VLOG?