My biggest issue with the Colonies is the travel times when combined with one turn a day turn battles into once a month activities at most, especially once the roads decay from battle. For example, let's say Vladamire Abjur has a unit of 100 men and no scouts and wants to travel to Ammersfield from OTC (due to Outer Tilog's ongoing war with Giblot, this particular path has become familiar stomping grounds to me). The most direct route is Outer Tilog - Rollsovar - Ammersfield, which looks like a fairly small trip right? That movement would take him roughly 50 hours, or 8 turns. That means that move will take literally more that a week real time to perform. A week to travel through one region. That's not including the return trip (which, if there is any wounded, is going to take even longer and there is going to be wounded guaranteed from the starvation in the area). I know that things are supposed to move slower in the Colonies, but that's a touch ridiculous, don't you think? Turns things into a slog and it's hard to keep things interesting when most of your time is spent in the middle of moving to the place where action is (hopefully) going to happen. Fighting the Giblot nobles is easy, the real fight comes not from their army but from their regions!
Ran into a similar problem in the Assassins, moving across those bridges from the Bakker Woods to the eastern regions we gained is a pain in the neck. It's practically the same amount of time spent to move from DC to Koolaris via the bridges as it is to travel south to Steepglades first and then head north from there, and that method is almost always the better choice tactically (it's easier to keep an army cohesive over shorter 1-2 turn "hops" than it is trying to move it over a long multi-turn path). Makes maintaining Helsera and Koolaris difficult as well for Courtiers.
Personally, I'd do away with the roads (due to there supposedly being "very little infastructure outside of the main cities" already being one of the main causes of their being only one turn a day in the colonies) and take a look at slashing travel times generally. I'd also consider making it harder to control regions outside of those bordering the various Capitals, the aforementioned lack of infrastructure again making it harder to control places just outside of a realms' easy reach and thus making succession/colony takeovers a more attractive option to empire building. Hopefully it would also encourage tribute-type war concessions as opposed to wars of annexation. Realms that really hated each other could still wipe the other off the map, but it would be better to setup a new realm in their place as opposed to try to rule the regions themselves. I really think that would make the Colonies play more like how they're described to be than how they currently play now while making them unique and fun in their own way.
Which makes me wonder... Are there ever any battles on the colonies? They must be rather small, as the colonies have poor regions mostly and people have to limit their recruitment so that they can pay them for 2-3 weeks.
On top of the "twice the travel times, half the hours, hours the turns" I already stated, I'll add that core things like tax and payment working the same as elsewhere pretty much made it unplayable to me.
I did try the colonies a few times. Left, then came back. The 1 turn per day wasn't what bothered it, it's all of the rest that did.
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