Build/Loot roads

[Chenier]

Title: Build/Loot roads

Summary: Allow troops to both improve travel times by working on roads and hinder them by looting them.

Details: Looting roads is a great feature on stable that, while extremely situational, has been used rather effectively in a small number of battles. Thus, it is far from game-breaking. It is no longer available on testing, though, and it would be great to have it back. Reversely, there never was any means to improve travel times, and roads on Testing especially tend to be, as the game puts it, "extremely bad". It would be nice if armies could work to improve the road conditions, both as a counter to looting them, and just in general to help improve the travel times, namely on Dwilight, that can be horrendously long (40+ hours is not uncommon, Mountain of Woe to Sabadell is about 70 hours, for example, 69 hours for myself).

Benefits: More strategic options and overall allowing players to actively take travel times into their own hands, and thus decreasing the time they spend travelling.

Possible Downsides/Exploits: Looting roads has never been exploited as far as I'm aware. And good roads are pretty much the norm on stable islands, so allowing players to improve the road conditions in war-torn continents can't really break the game.

[JeVondair]

I can see this having more of an effect for priests and advies than for troops as most regions only vary between needing a turn or two to cross. I would also add a point that detracts maintenance fees for these roads from taxes just as militia does and varied depending on the quality. They could even have tiers:


Lvl
1. Footpaths - Not so much a road as it is a route. Footpaths are unmapped and out of the way, causing significant delays in travel. (+2 hrs) (+10 gold)
2. Waggon Track - The path less-traveled, Wagon tracks are avenues of necessity for the peasantry and minor nobility, but suffer from ruts, holes, flooding, etc. (+1 hrs)(+0 gold)
3. Trade Route - An important, mapped byway, often including stylized road signs for ease of navigation. (-1 hrs)(-10 gold)
4. Kings Road - A well-paved, well-maintained, and well defended road initially planned and built by some nameless monarch as the best way through this region. (-2 hrs)(-20 gold)

[Chenier]

I'm not sure I see the impact on priests/advies, as it is. Well, especially advies. 16+ hour treks are always reduced to 16 hours for advies, no?

The ability to levy taxes to improve roads, or manually impose toll fees, could be interesting as well.

[Medron Pryde]

As he noted, 30+ hour travel times on the testing islands are not uncommon.

And now that the region-noble limits have been locked in, many nations have uncontrolled regions outside their borders.  I know the Hinterlands idea may help with this in the future, but it would be nice to have a way to manually send people to go out and fix the roads now so we can keep travel times more reasonable.