[Malorn]

If they do it right you'll care more about the resource value of the territories than you will the facilities.

If my understanding of the vision is correct the primary advantage of facilities is purely logistical. It's still an advantage, but if resources matter (and I've argued in other posts today that they must and the will), it will be the resources that are the more important.

Remember that your foothold is also a base you can always go to, so effectively it is a super facility. You don't necessarily need to claim a facility outside of that, but you do need to secure resources.

The Civilization games had great algorithms for randomly generating reasonably balanced resource distributions, so we know they exist. I'm sure they could use the same sort of algorithms to ensure there's no gross imbalances with the resource distribution.