In my view there are several improvements that can be made to hamlets to improve the fairness between harvesting hamlets  (defending) and attacking hamlets, but also we need more bands at the top end.

My suggestions are :-

1. Add at least 3 more bands to the upper end of hamlets

2. Allow spies to be sent to a hamlet when capturing them

3. Do not allow stoneheart troops to attack non lapidary's hamlets

4. Reduce the force limit for attacks

At the moment those harvesting hamlets are just sitting ducks waiting to be attacked. But if you are risking your troops then at least you should be given a fighting chance.

1. Currently hamlets are divided into bands, i.e. only players between certain level can see hamlets in their band ( not sure what plarium calls this but bands is the best fit).

Once a player gets to level 91 in the game then they are in the top hamlet band and are competing with all players above level 90.

This has 2 downsides, the obvious one is a level 91 can not compete with a level 150 when trying to defend or attack a hamlet.  And there are not enough hamlets to go around.

Solution: Add more bands e.g. level 91-110, level 111 to 130, level 131 to level 150 and above level 150 (for now)

2. In order to stop your hamlet from being spied, and then attacked,  players usually want to send spies to a defended hamlet to stop sucessful spying and hopefully prevent an attack.

But you can only select off & def troops when capturing hamlets, your spies need to be sent after you have captured the hamlet, leaving your hamlet vulnerable until the spies get there.

Solution: Allow spies to be sent when captuing hamlets i.e. add them to the list of troops to send.

3.  Stoneheart troops can be used at lapidary's hamlets, but they can not be use to defend the other types of hamlets. But an attacker is allowed to attach non lapidary's hamlets with stoneheart troops.

This gives the attacker an unfair advantage as not only are stoneheart troops stronger than regular troops they also come with stone heart abilities like enemy defence bonus decrease and ' Defence of non-stoneheart Units in offensive battles' reduction etc.

Solution:  no not allow stoneheart troops to attack regular hamlets.

4. Currently the force limit for hamlets is the same as that for attacking players castles (250,000)

If this limit was reduced then more payer would be willing to try hamlets as there would be less risk of loosing a very large defence force.

Only the biggest players can safely defend hamlets atm, but a reduction in the Force limit would allow the medium sized player to be able to defend hamlets too.

Solution: Reduce the Force limit to 100,000   NB the defence limit can also be reduced to match if needed.

Whilst these improvements will not make it safer when harvesting hamlets at least it will make things fairer.

Hamlets are a great feature of the game and an ideal arena to practice attacking and defending at all player levers (under level 91!! ). If they were fairer then more player would learn their skills on hamlets.