I don't think you can do a single thing about spam without affect other necessary parts of the game in a negative way. So here's a thought.. just make spam a bannable offense. The rules clearly state that it is prohibited to "violate or harm other players physically or mentally" - that is essentially the entire point of spam. If you make spam against the rules, the onus is put on the player and the mods to determine whether an attack is "meaningful" - and in this case meaningful is not "make the player shut off their alarm or clog up their command overview and make the game unplayable." From there it's a judgment call, and if mods are trained properly to identify the difference between spam and "meaningful" attacks, you'd be able to solve this. For example, favor farming 10 waves of harpies in 10 different attacks is not "spam", I can argue that those are meaningful attacks I send after I've killed militia with slings to steal favor while avoiding any real harm done by zues rage. My guess is someone who simply attacks and cancels all day long, or sends waves of 5 ls to every city will have a much harder time rationalizing their actions. If the player can show that a player is attacking solely for the purpose of harassment / spam, and the player themself cannot come up with an adequate defense for their actions (that are easily seen in the logs), then that player should be banned. Yes, you are relying on the mods to be competent enough to determine what is/isnt spam - which I fully recognize is a stretch and lends itself to bias. But I would argue that that is still a better option than changing mechanics of the game that would hurt those of us that play the game at a high level (and don't need spam to do so).