Cities and communes cannot effectively fight eachother without allying with another city/commune in order to get alchemy/enchantments. This is not a good thing. As such, I suggest the following changes:

Add the metals copper, tin and lead as commodities. They exist IC, but you cannot buy them.

Add a set of eight skills to enchantment that make and enchant metal disks that can be either rubbed or touched. They have 50 charges* each and have the same effects as the potion listed under them. They can be recharges as normal. The effects are listed below the name of the disk are are exactly the same as sipping/applying the relevent potion.

* It takes 1% reserves or 1% from a powerstone or one point of cube recharges to give each of these 5 charges.

Copper - 50 copper
Touch-Health
Rub-Fire

Silver - 50 silver
Touch-Mana
Rub-Frost

Tin - 50 tin
Touch-Bromide
Rub-Liniment

Gold - 50 gold
Touch-Love
Rub-Allheale

Bronze 40 copper and 10 tin
Touch-Sanguine
Rub-Regeneration

Iron 50 iron
Touch-Choleric
Rub-Mending

Mercury 40 mercury 10 gems
Touch-Phlegmatic
Rub-Quicksilver

Lead 50 lead
Touch-Melancholic
Rub-Antidote

This will allow cities to fight without alchemy, even if it is at a somewhat higher cost.

Second, add the following skills to alchemy.

Resin - Made with rosehips
Apply to $thing for fist sigil effects.
Apply to ground for palm sigil effects for a IG day.

Balm - Made with sparkleberry
Beauty, perfection, mercy and kingdom effects for half an IG day. Applied.

Clarity - Made with weed
Apply for focus enchantment effects(uses focus balance), apply to head for deathsight, sip for a defense that lets you SCRY $name once.

Third, add the following uses to the already existing alchemy items.

Apply salt to ground for monolith effects for 1 IG day.

Apply sulfer to $thing for flame sigil effects.

Apply sulfer to ground for eye sigil effects.

Apply frost $direction for icewall.

Apply fire $direction to melt icewalls.

This would allow communes to fight without enchantments.

Hm, missing statues and paintings.

Edit: Nevermind that.

Apply vitae to $statue to make it behave as if enchanted.
Apply vitae to $painting1 and $painting2 to make the two paintings behave as if enchanted.

Both require a full vial and empty the whole vial.

You, sir, win this thread, before it was truly started

Simple: don't have them, and remove some things from the alchemy replacement (such as vitae, which I don't see on that list). The two are meant to be substitutes, not replacements, for the other, so it doesn't make sense to have equivalents for every skill on the list.

One concern: Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't scrolls need to be enchanted to work? This would be a significant drawback to losing enchantment access, unless a suitable alternative was found.

You need skills from both alchemy and enchantment for magic scrolls.

Ah right, the magic ink. Forgot about that one. No big deal, then.

Where's the alchemy cleanse enchantment equivilant?

Magicwater - Juniper? Can't think of a good plant here.
Apply instead of scrubing to clean yourself.

40 mercury for phlegmatic = baddddddd

40 mercury for a re-enchantable disk that lasts about as long as a vial.

One disc per person, though, and there's more than 30 regular city fighters I'd bet. 1200 mercury? I don't think the game has even produced that much by now, it's annoyingly rare.

I'm not particularly fond of the idea. Especially because all the alchemy stuff has limits, like half an IG day or an IG day. Why would it get that? That'd just make it annoying to bother with. I don't want to put up mercy/perfection/beauty/kingdom every 30 minutes and I don't want to go rubbing stuff on stuff every hour. I especially don't want to have to run around Ethereal Serenwilde every hour to go apply a monolith potion to all 55 rooms.

Makes no sense and is a silly idea really, we're not all meant to be equal, cities and communes are not just meant to be carbon copies with a 1 and a 0 changed here and there, if the cities go to war with both communes, they can easily get around trade bans, there is always someone who will be willing to put gold in front of loyalties, plus with kegs, you can just stock up a lot before your city goes to war.

I think doing this will make cities and communes self-reliant, effectively killing a little portion of social interaction with eachother. It is ment to be this way IMO.

Meant to be this way is not the same as should be this way.

The thing is that the only real reason to do this is to stop a Commune having to ally with a city to have enchantments and a city with a Commune to get alchemy. The point of that is to make relationships more dynamic (and maybe end up with a communes vs. cities war everyone keeps going on about.) I'm not sure "social interaction" is a major loss there. In the short term said interaction for me consists of bothering Telperion for 5 minutes every few RL weeks.

Social interaction was more along the lines of city+commune allegiance.
I don't like this disc idea.

There's probably a better way of doing it, honestly, but the plan is sound enough.

And the whole point is to free up commune+city allegiances/alliances, unless you're saying the game is better off with them (which isn't necessarily absurd, but I'm not clear on whether you're saying it or not.)

I'm curious why with kegs and cubes city vs commune isn't possible.

Because you will eventually run dry, and then you have to come crawling back and beg for peace because you can't bash/fight anymore due to a lack of resources. The communes actually have another drawback, in that if you accidentally deplete the energy on your enchantment, you won't be able to refresh it.