I was thinking along the lines of:
a. Your realm is undefended and is being hit constantly by independant pirate factions, to represent this have a drain on said accounts income and untrained production, i dont want to sound too extreme but it should'nt be some light thing, mabye -40% income -25% up, This sounds harsh, but it means that to keep your incomes it will force you to maintain a defense, thus breathing a lot of life back into stale "war" aka farming.
b.the miner killing option i added to urogards post about killing lifers, pasted here;
actually now that ive thought it out a lot better, having the ability to only kill miners, and not lifers would be better.
as it stands lifers are nothing but a penalty, but if this change were enacted lifers would become something you actually want to have a somewhat larger than normal number of if your a warlike person, as one of the costs of war can be your miners.
This by itself would change how this current war is working, with people hiding behind no stats and all miners making large incomes and just selling the naq for $, now to keep those large incomes you would need to keep a ldefense up through mass attempts to ensure against the predation of your population.
also in regards to the machanics of it, since people are so worried, have the option to destroy miners available in a situation like this one that follows;
Player a declares war and starts attacking/massing player b, he is unable to just destroy his defense and start on the mienr population, but unless player b is either 1,also declared war against player a, or to stop people from hiding behind not warring the person, has performed a certain number of attacks, or some other determining criteria against player a.
I just wanted to consolidate my idea from uroguards lifer kill post neatly in with my new suggestion
sorry if i made ya read twice 
