I know it's a tough decision to make, especially with the AI being unable to garrison its castles but I can't take anymore the tremendous turtle speed of unit movements on the campaign map.
Despite road posts everywhere in my domain, it takes less to build a recruitment center (of any type) at the front line and to recruit fresh new troops there than to recruit and deliver troops from my native centers. This cannot stand.
Currently, it takes 3 turns, that's nine months to get from Satsuma to Higo. Needless to say, in offensive campaigning it means you also take the winter attrition just to get there to attack, 75% of times.
Unless I am mistaken it takes 3 turns but it might take 4 actually (IIRC the unit could stop just outside the castle, inside the action circle of the castle garrison if any). For the sake of logics the difference between 3 and 4 is irrelevant.
Since I am testing this change in another mod, along with other features, I wanted to stress out the importance of making the unit movement a bit faster on the map. This is especially true for the mangonels... they will reach the front line when the war is over but the same goes for all units, including the agents who by all accounts travel much faster (ironic).
In the meanwhile, the general you are recruiting from gets killed or bribed... the manual move to a castle gets cancelled because you lost the castle.... and a move of 1 yr earlier adds to hundreds of moves with other units to a terrible micromanagement that the low speed problem generates.
For Shimazu, this means every turn you must make sure the passage to Nagato is clear... just to mention one of the micromanaging issues.
In 2600BC an army could march at normal speed 30 li per day. I am not claiming it, it's Sun Tzu saying so. The acknowledged forced march speed is 50 li per day.
Now the "li" measure has been "updated" many times in chinese history but it's sure we must assume its quantity is the one of the arcaic period.
Here's the li: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_%28unit%29
Specifically: However, more recent and reliable determinations show that during the Early and Later Han dynasties the value of the Chinese li was 0.4158 km (0.2584 miles).
As you can see by the screenshot, the distance between Kagoshima and Nagato is 135km, rounded up to 150km and which accounts to 340 li (rounding to the closest integer and increasing the distance to simulate road movement instead of aerial distances).
340/30= 11,3
That's right.
It should take 11 days to reach Higo from Satsuma and right now it takes 3 turns, 3 seasons which means 9 months (as I said earlier, maybe an entire year).
I know there's difficulties about this change but perhaps we could reach a better game/history compromise somehow. 10 days is 1/3rd of a month, 1/9th of a season. We are around 9 times slower than we actually should be.
... and that's maths + history saying so.