So spiking has been around for as long as Travian has existed, but it should have no place in the modern version of the game at least in its current state, here's why:
☀ 99% of the time it is not used as a "tactical" and coordinated strategy to benefit kingdoms and to give them a slight upper hand of not touching the spiked villages and letting the enemy lose small amounts of troops on it, usually it is some person who is not even in a kingdom doing it, or someone who is, but is doing this in secret.
☀ Spiking is done for 2 reasons, to gain easy def points or as a stupid way to frustrate, but not towards specific players, but simply because the cycle of spiking continues and people hold grudges and decide to do so themselves.
☀ And most importantly one person can screw the whole server over just because they can.
☀ Makes no sense to why troops would be defending an abandoned village with their lives.
☀ People are abusing the system by spiking villages and going on vacation, even going on in test right now...
My suggestions:
☀ Limiting how many units can be sent to defend an inactive village;
☀ Add a hidden attacker bonus for inactive villages to favour the attacker when small amounts of troops are fighting (5 clubs kill 4 out of 10 phals or something);
☀ Have starvation on reinforced troops regardless of crop/h.
☀ OR AT LEAST show the name of the person spiking the farms in the report as it would not only make spikers better known targets, but also take away the frustrating way of finding out who it is by screenshotting every fucking top defender page and comparing recently gained defender points, because we ALWAYS find out who it is regardless.
However, making a change like stopping people reinforcing inactive villages all together would result in EVERYONE on the server farming the same inactive villages, leaving barely any res for anyone to find, this is probably the reason the developers decided not to do so after many people had asked.
Constructive criticism and other ideas are appreciated