Well, from my own experience since they were added, the main risk is when the emporium is freed by a player whose defense carring capcity has been filled up.

The emporium then shows as "unclaimed" in everybody's oracle, so people race for them an clash the first to be there.

After having messaged people when it happens, they all agreed to use the "one hero + defense" method to reduce casualties.

The owner loses nothing and the late players lose only a free hero... Their defense takes no part in the combat.

The problem is some people still think they should send some serious offense... And lose it all, as of course, the first owner will have stored enough defense there to carry enough resources. That's why late parties are wowed to lose 100% of their offense, unless of course they send an overwhelming one, but they'll still sustain serious losses anyway.

So the "one hero" method is definitely the best solution between civilized and courteous players !

Then you still have the perpetual same damn freaks who confuse vital resources gathering and bullying "for PvP".

Well, what can be said ? Those unpleasant people receive a retaliation raid to start with, then if it's ot enough, their hegemon, polemarches and all their members if the message is still unclear.

People acting like that engage their coalition into a war. It's every hegemon's duty to have their members respect people who are peaceful with them, or accept to face a real war with a coalition that may be much stronger than them.

Our own hegemon will not allow the least hit on any pantheon, colony or city unless we're officially at war. Especially for Pantheons : whoever hits any other coalition's pantheon will be immediately fired from the coalition and raided to death. Starting a war is NOT a pun.

It's not difficult to ask your members to behave... But we can see everyday, and especially during PvP tournaments or those useless pantheons tournaments that it's still not done. Well, people behaving like that would better not owning a pantheon, as they won't keep it for long. :p

Anyway, spying on an emporium or attacking it (apart from clashes when everybody sees it as unclaimed) is just a casus belli.

You're talking about level 60+ players, so they're supposed to be experimented enough to behave.

I explained a simple trick to avoid any unwanted losses, so race clashes should never be an issue.

Only delibarate aggressions will be, and aggressors will have to face the consequences, but it has always been the case already with colonies : nothing has changed there, except you can at least save some resources.

And low level players are not clashing anymore with higher levels ones, so now they can't complain anymore about bullying.

So I think that, correctly used, emporia are mostly an improvement.

Now I agree they could have been added without removing classical colonies, as it is done in other Plarium games (you have 3 tabs in your "protectorates" section then).

Having both kinds, with different exploitation strategies, could have been interesting, especially the ability to hold them with minimalistic garrisons, but with the risk to lose all that has been collected in case of an attack... Different kinds, different advantages and drawbacks : leaving some choice to players would have been nice. :)

Emporias. Have you see the changes in everybody behaviour?

Emporias is for 60´s level player or lower, not many 70´s or 80´s, because casualties r too big.

On the other hand, a big reduction of the cities atacks, everybody r waiting for a PVP tournament to send ofensive troops against any emporia, I think next tournament will imply an emporia desertification, we will see.

While I'm all for fixing the host of problems in this game and improving and adding to various aspects of the game to increase the choice of options, tactics and strategy, I'm getting real tired of there being no simple fixes for the age old problems and with the only "improvements" being such complete and utter nonsense as this under the guise of supposedly making things more fair.

It's suppose to be a war game and one which use to require a long term outlook and plan as well as some common sense to survive and succeed. As at one point we were ALL low level players. And at one point, one did not even consider playing the colony game until one was at least a level 60-65 player.

For which those of us who have paid our dues to reach a degree of success are now being told that all of our time and efforts have lead to our having some kind of an unfair advantage for which we must be limited and punished.

As since this, and yet once again unannounced, unexplained and non-clarified nonsense began, there has been only 1 drachma emporium ever available to myself given my level, while others within the same area of the map as myself have as many as 8 available to them. For which the ability to collect more from a drachma emporium as a higher level player is made entirely irrelevant when there is only 1 such emporium in existence. 

If it ain't broke don't fix it. If it needs mending then mend it, rather than completely altering it beyond all recognition, reality and relevancy.