I believe most players see the Emporiums aspect of Sparta as a huge waste of game features on nothing.  Rather than working on adding a new (and annoying) feature Plarium should consider fixing the Emporium gameplay.

Why?  Because it takes up space, screens, graphics, a building and agreements – And it doesn’t work at all.

How many Emporiums (or Emporia) are ever occupied?  

Maybe 3-4 out of hundreds...

How many players ever bring home resources from them?

My experience - Sometimes two Peltasts collecting a single Drachma at double speed can make it but even that short stay is very iffy. 75% of the time they get killed.  Forget anything longer than that.

Who cares how many “ox teams” you can send, how fast they collect resources or how far your oracle can "see"?

All these features are useless because you never use the Emporiums for real resource collection anyway.

Emporiums have turned out to be only killing fields where you send units to die for PVP points.  

Not even high level players (I'm level 90) can hold an Emporium long enough to make the 5000 grain collection reward.

If I send 3, 5 or 8 Mill defense they last a little longer but still die... they never bring anything home.

There are players that regularly send several 100 Mill offense to kill emporium teams.  Once you are past level 70 (In the “big” pool) you are always subject to these unlimited size attacks.  No survival chance.

The only useful thing left for the Emporiums to do is provide the 2 Agema reward pack for killing another player’s team (By arranged mutual killing)

Some fix suggestions:

Double Resource Collection speed every minute you are there.  To make them relevant emporiums should compete with raiding bots for resources.

Limit force size for holding emporium to 5000 units and attack force to 1000 units.  This changes the battle dynamics completely.

Provide 1 minute warning of incoming raids on Emporiums (Would allow players to pull out and reduce the incentive for "hunting" emporiums since most raids would fail to hit anything).

Provide big defensive bonus for holding emporiums making them costly to raid.