The abuse potential as you speak is literally present on already many things in this game, I hardly doubt that this will be a problem. If you have a strong force, you build alliances to fight against the faction, I'm sure you'll always find Players around that want to fight the opposite faction.
Secondly, the IFF change doesn't automaticly give commodities/equipment/ship change, I did not propose anything like that, if anything I said NPCs. Also, for bases to actually have the commodity/equipment/ships been sold of the said conquering faction, you still need to spend huge amount of time to siege all single bases in a System in order to actually claim Victory. Like I said, 5 Bases and you have to capture ALL of them in order to claim the System, each base would prolly take 4 - 5 hours (or maybe even a day, like the old PoBs), you can ballance this pretty much.
Speaking of which, you do realize I said specific systems (battlezones) like Omega-5, Omicron Delta, Nagano, like old New Hampshire and certain other systems that are known for Battlezones inRP. On each update, devs could add more such battlezones in which player can conquer stuff via RP improvement (remember official events).
@sindroms I understand about that part, what if Admins/Devs select 2 - 3 Systems on each update as "conquerable" during 1 - 2 month period and then on each update more systems will be selected as "Conquest Sectors", this way abuse can be handled, there's always a way to ballance this mate.
For all I care it could even be an "Official Event" and involved factions during a specific time period can conquer Bases until the Event is over.