It is impossible to claim 8 chunks away from a non-peaceful town. This makes sense since it solves the problem of peaceful towns protecting the non-peaceful towns, making it impossible to attack them effectively.

But that simply makes the "proximity of the nearest non-peaceful town" a very significant factor when deciding the location of a new town. Which makes it almost impossible to build towns in geographically accurate locations or simply favorable locations in general.

This by itself should not be too big of an issue, but when you consider it, the easiest way to "intentionally grief the server" would be to just make very small non-peaceful towns all around the map, filling their bank with enough money for them to survive for months and then simply leaving which is EXACTLY what new players do by default, making this a very common problem.

My fix for this issue would be bringing back any kind of plunder mechanic, similar to what we had in Nations 1 (for those who do not remember, you could simply stand in siege chunk and drain the money from the town's bank into your own balance).

There is simply no downside to this, since turning your town non-peaceful is a choice and should carry responsibility with it. People who decide to make their towns attackable should be ready to defend it, and simply leaving the server and making your town an issue for anyone who wants to settle near your location should not be possible, therefore I do not think there is a reasonable argument against the ability to simply take away the balance from town's bank.

The only problem with it that I could see is "afk sieges" when the attacker intentionally attacks only when the defenders are not online making it impossible for a defender to reasonably defend their town, but that could be fixed by simply adding the mechanic of the defender being able to take the money from "war chest" in the same way the attacker is able to take it from town bank. In that case, no reasonable argument can be made against the ability to plunder towns as it would only be done against towns that

a) Consciously decided to turn non-peaceful and were unable to defend themselves
b) Towns that are owned by a group of people that have completely left the server and have no interest of defending in the first place.

And for those concerned about the possible way for attackers to wait for the defender to completely drain the war chest and then proceed with "unstoppable" overnight afk sieges, if this scenario REALLY causes that many problems, it would be possible for plunder to be transferred directly into war chest and not into attacker's balance, making it reclaimable during the day when siege sessions are "contestable".