Alright, backtracking on comments a bit.
Renodin, what do you mean the Lurian area being like the Northern area? The new Lurian area would be much smaller than the North. Otherwise, being "like the North" is mostly a good thing, being that the North has many realms neighboring each other, and with the tweaks drafted would be even better than it is now.
D'Hara is "buffed" mostly by the addition of rurals between their cities and north of them. I used to really like handling the food scarcity back in the days, but to be honest I was probably about the only one. It was kind of ridiculous to hinge a realm's survival on an aspect of gameplay that nobody cared about, a ton of food was rotting in foreign warehouses as we starved because their lords just didn't give a !@#$. The price cap was hiked to incite lords to sell, I presume, but Port Raviel and Port Nebel are just way too poor to balance out their positions and ridiculous lack of food. Dwi has a bunch of cities that are both wealthier and have way more food nearby. Giving a few more rurals wouldn't break things, it would just make them a bit less absurd.
Its chokepoints already exist. There's already a ferry route from Qubel Lighthouse to Sallowtown. This only makes it a land connect, the main effect being to reduce distance in miles. So less travel times, and less distance from home penalties when on the continent. This change makes it easier for them to attack others, maybe, but it's mutual and not huge. For one, the addition of rurals makes it easier for foreign realms to land armies directly on the islands. As it is, those islands only have 1 region that doesn't have walls, now there'd be 6 (including Dizeddo). Plus, Astrum, and any realm friendly to it, could launch an invasion straight from Libidizedd. Alternatively, D'Hara and allies could try to take on the Astrumese Hegemony and take on Libidizedd themselves. Either way, it's potential for war and conflict to replace isolation. D'Hara needs to be able to interact with others more, and Astrum needs to be more vulnerable than it currently is (the same arguments about the 6 rurals to land in and friendly city that applied to D'Hara would to Astrum's insular holdings).
Making the Lurian region a backwater one is somewhat exaggerated, but somewhat intentional. It gets shrinked considerably, but it maintains a high wealth density. If it survives (with so few nobles it's basically dying on its own), it would now have greater ability and incentive to war Madina, Fissoa, or Swordfell, instead of being content with huge swaths of undisputed land and nothing to do with it. Otherwise, even if the realm was to collapse to whatever, it's high wealth density makes it fertile grounds for disputes between those three realms. It's remade in a way to make it viable to split up Luria among many realms as well as to host a realm or two there.
I tried to remove all ferries, in general. It's also to consider that Anaris is thinking of making rogues embark through sea travel. These 6 rurals on the D'Haran island would not just be vulnerable to human armies, but rogue incursions as well.
The Lurian region was "decimated" because almost all of it was rogue, and much of the rest was lordless regions. It is basically a huge black hole on the continent right now. The mountains aren't impenetrable. For one, they are a viable target themselves, being rich and belonging to a realm. Secondly, there's a land route along the eastern coast, one needs not pass through the mountains to go North. Then there's sea travel. Raplacing some of the land passes with bridges as has been suggested for a future draft would allow them to sail straight to just about anyone. Would they be immediate neighbors to everyone? Of course not, impossible for such a large map. But they would have considerably greater interaction potential than they do now.
I must also note I don't know what you mean when you talk about squares.
Luria already starved, with its current geography, on a number of times. They just focused it on Giask. It's not a huge change. As I said in an earlier post, though, I'm quite open to simply removing Giask Outright. I don't like the impact of those huge cities on the game.
"Northern replica": just having a few cities by a sea in no way makes it a replica. Luria has a bunch of cities, namely large and huge, in a tight concentration, in the middle of a vast expanse of nothingness. This, I do not think in any way comparable to have a few tiny cities around a lake in a vast inhabited area held by many quite different realms and more homogeneous territory. The Lurias were basically guaranteed to have no immediate neighbor due to the city placement, this area pretty much guarantees everyone will have multiple neighbors.
