Is this possible?

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.  

The road ability stuff seems hardcoded, you could probably modify them completely away if you wanted and do manual road building instead. 

You can modify this in elementaldefs.xml. Don't think you can make it for cities as well easily though.

<MinDistancesBetweenOutposts>3</MinDistancesBetweenOutposts>

Just keep in mind consulates can be very important (outpost upgrade to city), and as such having 3-4 outposts next to your city is a valid strat.

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.

Oh. Hmm, either way, that's probably hard coded too. But I like the idea, the only problem might be making the AI understand it too

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

N/A