Thanks for giving some constructive criticisms Gustav. You are as objective as ever and I always value your opinions. Good that I am not in charge of game balance.
I am sorry. Are boring realms devs fault? No. Realms being boring is 100% player's fault. Devs provide features but it is the responsibility of each and every player to either create fun with those features or enjoy fun provided by others.
Here are what some people believe at the moment
1) Less regions for players to increase the density
+with 3:1 noble per region ratio, realms should be more compact. With more nobles in each realm, people will communicate more.
-Getting to 3:1 ratio through monsters will make people leave out of frustration. This could be really bad since people will constantly leave and regions required to reach the ratio will also be reduced making more realms lose more regions starting the cycle again until only those who will not leave no matter what. At this point, I doubt it will be that fun.
Method of achieving this at the moment: Monsters to hammer people until they either fight to the end to lose their realms or go somewhere before they get completely overrun. Maybe not as many people will quit during the process. If you disagree with this method, how would you achieve the higher density? Let's not forget players can bring more players into end this monster invasion quickly as well.
2) More realms close to each other + peasant militias to prevent their destruction
+wars will mostly happen between your direct neighbours making things quite fast. You will travel 2 days at most to reach your neighbour then 2 days back to refit. Rinse and repeat constantly.
+no realm death = no rage quitters maybe
-short distance wars are tiring. Usually requires people to stay active for longer. Asking such high activity in the current state may not be the best. Fun wars could possibly attract people enough to stay active.
-eventually people will get sick of fighting their neighbours and will just ally with them. Then what? Fight your neighbour's neighbour?
Method: Maybe some realms will spare dying realms their cities so they could come north but that is highly doubtful. Most realms will try to integrate other nobles into their own realms with promises that will take a long time to come true.
Personally, I do not know what is the best way to make people move up north and make realms stay close to each other rather than have to spread across the whole map like they have now. Just making Madina and Fissoa move further north would help the situation a lot.
If I had an option - obviously my previous idea of forcing realms won't work -, I would have instead just reduced gold and food in the western border regions and moved those to east to make eastern regions a lot more attractive. Instead of fight and die or flee, it might be better to stay very very poor or migrate east in search of richer lands. Do it one region at a time every week maybe. People can still stay but regions won't produce enough gold and food to make people want to stay. Maybe this is just another horrible idea.
But one thing is for certain. Until we have enough players to fill the gap, realms need to stay more tightly. Yeah sure it won't make Dwilight feel as large as before but if monsters are gone and people are allowed to recolonize all the cities, people will just try to stay as far away from other realms as possible. That is not the solution with the current noble count of 195 or so. Areas must be limited but ice age or pushing people with monsters isn't the way to go. Maybe blocking the western lands with monsters is okay but pushing them into east doesn't feel like a good solution.
