Ok so not meaning to reinvent the wheel here. I know that some of the suggestions I give here will have been already made. In that case consider my suggestment as agreement and vote in their favor. That being said the ideas I put here are my ideas as ive only been playing for a week now and would like to see improvements just like everyone else.
1. Roads should give a 10-15 second increase on production times but only on building they connect to. This would cause roads not to be free of cource I dont think a cost of 10 stones per road section would bother anyone considering with them free we get no benifit other than cosmetics.
2. Bandits should actually practice Banditry, then i an stop making the colonial joke about getting your troops drunk, convincing them the innocent purely defensive indiginous people are bandits and conquering them. Now I dont mean anything major. But an occasional worker gets ambushed, a building in a newly conquered area is attacked. so on and so forth. Or a specific attack every few levels with a story description given via the quest function. If you want someone who can work on the Narrative Scripts Ill be happy to come up with a few scenarios the Dev's can use.
3. Now there should be in addition to a few questline Banditry randomised Banditry, as mentioned above. However in order to have randomised Banditry, you need a way to counteract the banditry. So implement another Tab for our General. The Border Patrol, Patrols consisting of 5-10 Units that can be composed the same way your army is. That patrol each conquered sector to lower Bandity. However even the best patrols cant stop everything.
4. New addition. A building that each section could have to make it more realisitc. A fort for soldiers that can be placed in each section, they would need only a captain unit not a general and can add t population limit, that would be specifically for soldiers.
5. Another idea to incorperate into this, You have a repair building function. Why not use it? Some of the bandeits set fire to a building or two temporarily slowing down production. Cost materials to repair. just one more way to smoothly introduce banditry into the game, and half the work is done already.
Once the bandits on your island are gone you have a defensive infrastructure to defend yourself with in pvp. once it comes. It will also get players ready to start thinking defensivly strategic for pvp. Kinda a building block towards the pvp system.
These are just a few for now I will add more by editing this post as they come to me. Leave comments and help me fine tune the Ideas.