Stopgap Beacon fix in my eyes, would be a simple expansion of beacon levels to 10, continuing with the 5% def boost per level so at 10 your defense is 50% stronger(much more and you shift the balance from offense to defense and in 6 months, the complaints pop up and you have to rebalance somehow). Temper this with adding fortress style downgrade reqs to going from 5-10, and you accomplish several goals in one move.
1)Makes it possible to hold beacons without absurd numbers.
2)More things to do/more competition to get to 10, and downgrading other beacons same as forts.
3)giving a 50% defense bonus in the current climate, for Leagues like ours, would truly only allow us to go from 3 beacons to 4 mathmatically speaking.
4)would give us something to do with all these resource packs we have sitting in our black markets.
Heck, more complicated additions to beacons would be buildings that add defensive bonuses, or that can create special beacon only troops that a marshall can build with contributed resources from leaguemates. Special beacon only "knowledge" type things, something as simple as your beacons produce can produce food to feed troops sitting in them. In pure Roleplaying terms, it is insane that my troops are sitting hundreds of miles away from my castle, and for some reason, I have to feed them "from my castle".
To the absurd, beacon "buildings" that allow you to sacrifice say 10 griffins, to create a new unit that has the power of 10 griffins+10%, but can never leave the beacon.
Simple ideas that would increase the efficacy of defense, and allow leagues to hold beacons with less fear of the hammers running around.
MinionCantoFoH
FoH Forever!
We received a lot of suggestions and ideas on how to change the Beacon balance, but the thing is that such changes are really global and will require a lot of changes to the balance, time and work of several teams.
At the moment, we can't implement it and don't plan to make any changes to the Beacons.
But devs are working on the changes in the League Fortress feature and it's one of the global tasks they're focused on at the moment.