I've weighed in on my feeling that it's not large alliances that are the problem, as much as it is stagnation that is the problem, and I think there are some ideas about a new alliances system that will help fix that.
But I have to say that I share the concerns about the political/intrigue side of the game getting devalued, and let me illustrate that with an example.
Let us say that I am the Ruler of a realm, and I am planning on fighting another realm. They are larger than my realm, and have more CS and an ally. So I spend months wheeling and dealing, working out favour trades, building up relationships, and get several realms together that have promised to back my efforts. This involves a great deal of engagement, and is all something the other realm could have been doing as well. But either they did not, or tried and failed, or maybe I've got better Ambassadors, or a couple of key connections to Council members, who knows? But when push comes to shove, all of my friends show up to the fight, and they and their ally are outclassed from the moment the first sword is drawn, and the war would be short and utterly one-sided.
Under the current rules, this would not be allowed.
However, let us say that instead, I keep my realm from fighting. I build up gold. The one ally I have also doesn't fight, and they build up gold. We can build up a massive pile of gold, and expand all our recruitment centers, so we have enough and troops to fund a campaign of all of our nobles at max recruitment for a couple of months on end, while the realm I want to fight is instead constantly fighting. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but they don't build up much of a gold reserve, and their nobles have to get by with just their estate income. I carefully wait for them to finish their latest war, so that I'm not dogpiling, but their regions are not in a great place, they have no gold, and their army is scattered. We recruit up using our massive gold hoard, declare war, and immediately seize the city on our border and stuff it full of militia because we don't actually need the gold from the city. Without their largest gold producer, and exhausted from the last war, suddenly we're creaming a realm half again our size because of superior preparation.
Under the current rules, this would be allowed.
To me, the only difference I see here is what type of preparation was done, and how much fun it was for different playstyles.
I would vastly prefer a setup where two things happened:
First, the density rules were either not enforced, or much more stringently enforced. If they weren't enforced, then people would have pretty strong incentives to keep expanding. If they were more stringently enforced, then realms would end up losing regions over time if they could not create fun for their nobles or attract new characters, and would start going out of their way to make sure they kept or enticed characters.
Second, I would rather focus the rules or mechanics on preventing the same characters (or families) from being in the same positions. It is difficult to work on new conflicts when the characters and people are all the same, and right now, in most continents there is no real way to end that. Even if you could destroy a realm, the density rules mean that the people in charge of that realm could move to another realm, bide their time, and launch a colonization effort. Realms can be reborn all the time, and since there are no longer any age penalties and no effective way to kill almost all nobles, very rarely does anyone ever get removed from the playing field except by the player getting bored to (the character's) death. This, to me, is the biggest problem.
