These are two very interesting concepts. Unfortunately I do not know the answer to either.

- 'Free' roads would have to somehow be tied into your kingdom's ZoC. Don't think that can be done at the moment.

- Building outposts within a certain distance should be possible with modding. It's possible to have cities not be able to build within a certain distance...the more I think about this idea, the more I like it. It could very well be the most important mod since Parrotmath's snaking mod.  

My goal isn't to limit the number of outposts, what I'm seeking is a Max distance between outposts back to other outposts or cities. I would like to make expansion a little harder and a little more gradual. No more Sending a settler half way across the map to grad some resources with an outpost.

I'd like to do a mod that has those two features,  a higher penalty for cities that aren't contiguous to your capital (like maybe a 25% or 30% unrest penalty instead of the current 15% penalty), slower roads (2 or 3 moves instead of 4), and no trade route treaties. So you would either have to build roads yourself, or have an uninterrupted set of boarders up to a neighbor before a road would appear. Ideally, if an outpost is cut off by An intervening city or outpost getting captured or razed then it would become inactive/dormant until a city or outpost replaces the lost one.

N/A