--If you want it to be 5% daily, it has to be automatic. So as long as you have your unit in your region, they should automatically repair equipment. Otherwise it will be better to just pay gold to fix equipment. You are underestimating the value of time in this game. It is a turn based game and when your general orders you to refit, you can't really go back to your region and sit there to save few gold when you can just ask any council to send you gold to get your equipment fixed. This feels like a feature for peace time at most.
You're completely missing the point. If you're at war then you should be heading back to the capital to refit anyway. If estate improvements meant you didn't need to do that then it would destroy game balance.
What should be the case is that, when a war's over, you can go back to your estate and save yourself some gold by repairing equipment gradually for free. Or it should be so that in wartime it's worth making a detour to your region while you're on the way to the capital so that you can get 10% of repairs for free before you have to spend gold on the rest at the capital.
--Wouldn't mind Chapel raising cohesion but the morale part is useless.
If morale is "useless" then so are all the current entertainment options and 'get priests to bless your men' options. But the fact is that a) morale isn't completely useless and b) it might get more useful in future. Either way though, none of these improvements should be essential. They should all, at best, be nice to haves. So if you don't give a flying monkey's about your men's morale then you don't build one, but if you care about your IG religion or if you plan on doing a lot of civil work you can spend the money to build one. Not all of these are meant to be equally useful but there should be a range of broadly realistic improvements and accompanying perks available.
--Hope training ground also slowly trains your men and raise their training. As for 120 gold for 40%, no it is incredibly cheap compare to the amount of gold you need to spend to get both swordfighting and jousting up to 40%. It costs you 16 gold per day for more than 10 days. Hack you probably need to spend at least a month raising your skill to reach 40% for both skills. That is 960 gold if you spend a month training swordfighting + jousting with a normal tutor for a month straight.
Training your unit could be another option then - perhaps this improvement could be used for unit cohesion boosting instead...
But this wouldn't mean you'd automatically improve your skill every time you trained at your estate so it'd still be a very time consuming process - and, unlike an academy, your estate generally won't be in a central location which means you're unlikely to be able to spend even a couple of weeks sitting there and training. I suppose the skill limit could be set to 30% or something though to make it more limited than an academy. And perhaps the build cost could be bumped up slightly - maybe 180 gold.
--Don't know about you but I never cared about gold to be honest. If you lack gold, you simply need to ask for more. This game doesn't give people enough gold to be self-sufficient. Gold is funneled to the top so you always need to ask for gold. Thought the current system was supposed to solve this problem we had with the old system but it failed miserably. Maybe because the system is incomplete but I also think it was just poorly thought out from the designing phase. Maybe the taxation system isn't the thing that is broken. Maybe it is region stats which were arbitrary decided by Tom.
If you've never cared about gold then don't build one on your estate. But not all realms are active in redistributing gold and if you're a knight of a poorer region you might well decide to build one as an investment in order to get paid back for the investment in the long run and to avoid having to constantly ask for gold. And those are the kind of knights who'd make use of this particular option.
You seem to be missing the point that not EVERY knight will want to build EVERY possible estate improvement. The whole point of the suggestions I've come up with is to offer a broad selection of options so that players have to pick and choose which ones to bother with and whether it's in-keeping with their character to build particular ones.
For instance, if you're a courtier then you won't have a big unit and won't really care about keeping unit costs low so a Guardhouse won't interest you. On the other hand you might be using your unit for civil work a lot and your character might be very religious so you'd decide to build a chapel - and you'd also probably build a mill to improve your estate efficiency. And if you were planning on entering a tournament then you'd probably want to build a training ground/yard for the sake of some free jousting training.
But mainly, the key point is that all of these together would give players some goals in the knight game. Okay, maybe there aren't any lordship vacancies and maybe the realm is at peace so there's not much to do - but at least you can set yourself the goal of saving up gold to improve your estate and, once you've made an improvement, maybe that'd make you decide to start a roleplay where you invite other nobles to come visit your estate.
As I keep saying, none of this should be about massively altering gameplay or balance. All it should be about is giving knights something more to do and giving them a reason to become emotionally invested in their estate.
