I think the #1(*) problem with Strategus is the concept that money flows from people. This is what has everyone sitting in a town, "working" (either actually "working" as in old strat, or crafting goods like now).
Instead, money should flow from fiefs. How about this overhaul:
* When a village is owned, you can no longer craft goods there. Instead, the village creates a number of goods per day. I suggest we try a number like 500. This is more than you would be producing with people, so it's a big bonus.
* Similarly, when a castle is owned, you can no longer recruit there. Instead, the castle generates a pool of "potential recruits". These are kind of like troops that don't cost anything and can't be used in combat in their present form, but they are there and ready to be picked up. Once you pick them up you can keep them or put them into the castle as real troops and then they will cost real money. I'm not sure how many should be generated per day but let's say 200? Up to a cap of, say, 2000. So every day you can just go there and pull another 200 troops from the castle and up to 2000 can be on standby.
* Every player can create 1 "business" on the world map, which must be in a town. They are free to create but you only get 1. The business generates 200 crpg gold per day and stores it until you go around and collect it. This is meant to be an emergency fallback/startup for clans to create a peasant army.
* You can now "recruit" anywhere on the map. You do not have to be in a village, town or castle. Open map recruitment is a 50% recruitment rate (so 1 troop every 2 hours on average). This is meant to be an emergency measure for people with no access to a castle. You can do this while moving for a 25% recruitment rate.
* You can "join" another player and this will cause you to move around the map together, under their control. This will make it easy to stick together but still give you the freedom to break off (e.g., to intercept a raider). Joined groups travel at the speed of the slowest person.
* (optional -- but might be awesome) Villages can no longer buy goods. Only towns can buy goods. You MUST caravan your goods. With the above changes, I think this might be good as it will force people to run those 500 goods every day from their villages to the towns, risking banditry along the way. Another option would be that villages no longer buy their own goods. So you don't have to go to a town, but you have to caravan *somewhere*.
So caravans will still be important. Even if you don't take my optional suggestion, it will still be a lot better to cross the map with them.
The main point of this is to make it far more profitable to own a fief than to sit around crafting. It's far more worth your time to caravan your goods under full escort than it is to sit around crafting goods, even if there's a neutral village nearby where this is feasible.
There will also be a lot more really big, expensive caravans running around and a lot more incentive to attack them.
(* - Actually the #1 problem with Strategus is the bug that causes you to lose the gear you are wearing when the map ends but we'll assume chadz plans to fix that. Soon.)
