To be honest, I'm not thrilled about the idea of allowing any kind of attacks on a realm without being at war with them. It complicates things, particularly when I've just introduced a mechanic requiring reasons for being able to attack a realm—which depends on having to declare war to attack a realm. Furthermore, I think it highly likely that 99% of the time, "hostile" would be used and seen as nearly synonymous with "war"—certainly, a realm having its regions attacked and looted isn't going to hesitate to treat that as an act of war.
If that is your concern, those attack options can be trimmed. It does complicate things but not in a bad way, i.e. it doesn't make anyone ragequit the game because he feels completely helpless.
My goal with this suggestion is not to allow players fight wars without a declaration. As you have noted, there are already legit ways to attack neutral realms without declaring a war anyway.
My actual goal is to give realms that can not sustain a real war due to low player count or do not feel like they are ready to escalate just that far an option to still engage enemies in a fun manner. The problem with the current system is there not being a middle option between Neutral and War. In my opinion it is the reason behind most so-called "bs wars". The way the game woks, it just has to go from "we're fine" to immediately "we're gonna murder you". There's no "now we hate you" stage when you can mess with each other in a meaningful way.
This needs a lot of thought as to the
spectrum of actual gameplay options hostile realms can have outside of proper wars with army on army battles. But I think it's worth it.
