I’ve been playing Stonehearth and following it’s updates for a while now, and I’ve always felt that the military patrol routes don’t really fit in to the game.
With the implementation of combat parties, and being able to dictate where to attack and defend, it seems fairly useless to have your military wandering around, when you’ll just send them directly to the encounter anyway.
Obviously the ‘random’ patrol routes are part of the problem, but I have already seen dozens of posts about variations to those, so this’ll be more about an alternative to patrolling altogether.
I’m suggesting the addition of other military-focused items crafted by the carpenter and the weaver, mainly things like Combat dummies, Archery targets, and Armour stands.
These would all be placed somewhere in your settlement, and rather than you units patrolling around, they would instead come to these targets and dummies to ‘train’.
Hearthlings would ‘practice’ their combat attacks on these items, giving them a slow exp gain equivalent to that from patrolling( At least I think you get exp from patrols, not sure 
)
You can still set them combat points e.t.c when encounters happen, and they’d just move there from this position, rather than from their patrol route.
This kinda leads into Tier2 military buildings and such. Armour stands aren’t strictly the main focus of this idea, but I think they’d be a much cooler way to store armour and weapons that in chests.
Any thoughts?