Realms are stupid and broken
I do not claim to know anywhere near enough about them to offer ideas on how to tweak them back in to working order
so instead I offer what is more of a total overhaul
Presumably devs would not want to completely scrap them even though the word on the street is that they should be completely scrapped
So here is a weird sort of alternative to how they could work that effectively neuters them and makes them more larpy and less retarded.
This came to me in a dream.
Realms are still built with a coronation stone and need a king or queen or w/e
but the idea of expanding them with cairns is gone
Monoliths are basically gone, if there are any there is like a super tiny amount that are all unique, but there should be a few more things similar to "Summit of The Mountain" around the world. Like "world wonders." ROB should be one, maybe even some weird underground shit, like archaeological sites that need to be mined out, or maybe even parts of the world where strange happenings occur, like a random part of the map where a giant fairy circle spawns only in the spring and is completely gone at other points of the year.
Realms would claim world wonders with something similar to a cairn, but they are way more expensive and require a lot of authority upkeep, generally this is something that would only be done after a realm has oathed in a lot of villages
There is no "line of cairns" to this area, it's just a single super expensive build with no attached chain of realm claims.
If a village wants to be part of a realm, a realm queen or some sort of appointed representative has to visit said village and "oath in" the village idol
this effectively makes the village [[village name] of [realm name]]
this village now has the option to build a new construction, like a trading post or offering table or something
the village builds this object and feeds it endlessly in order to gain realm benefits
The realm itself would choose what offerings it is accepting, maybe they are categorized like crops, forageables, meats, pelts, ores???
Now here is where I am a bit foggy but I can see a few different paths unfolding
maybe the offerings themselves are what grants the realm authority, like the are converted in to authority?
but maybe there is like some new categories of authority-like things
Like, a realm has a new GUI with hoards, like a crop-hoard, and ore-hoard, etc.
and these are intangible things, just bars that fill up based on the offerings from the villages
and with each world wonder a realm claims, they have the ability to create a new hoard, and full hoards are now like the things that apply minor buffs to people or places within the realm
So, example, X Realm has 10 villages oathed in, they finally manage to claim a special world wonder, build a nice wall around it and all that junk, and decide that they want to boost crops
So they go in to the realm GUI and choose to start a crop hoard
Maybe they must also build a physical representation of this for extra larping, something like a crop-theme grotesque idol, this is like a larp representation of the realm being "crop rich"
Now, they must change the offerings to crops in order to fill the crop hoard status bar
All villages oathed in are now responsible for giving a daily crop offering to their offering table construction
these offerings slowly fill the bar, and once it is full, a crop-related bonus comes in to effect for all areas oathed and claimed by the realm
obviously this bar would need to have a natural drain that must be maintained
I can imagine some things coming in to play, like offering quality, maybe requiring high quality would promote trade between realm villages who want to maintain buffs
Anyways, this was just a random brainstorm I had, surely some of this is just as garbage or exploitable as the current system, but I thought I would share it anyways because maybe some of the ideas would help spark some better ideas from other people
edit: side note - the idea is to force a mutual benefit between realm-creator village and oathed villages. Presumably, in order to try to break this with botting, a realm creator would have to bot like 20 individual oathed in villages with automated farming and offerings. The idea would be that each village has a maximum daily amount of offerings so hopefully we would surpass a threshold here where the idea of trying to solo this and break it with bots would simply not be worth it.