The purpose of this paper is to investigate the properties of spectral and tiling subsets of cyclic groups, with an eye towards the spectral set conjecture [9] in one dimension, which states that a bounded measurable subset of R accepts an orthogonal basis of exponentials if and only if it tiles R by translations. This conjecture is strongly connected to its discrete counterpart, namely that in every finite cyclic group, a subset is spectral if and only if it is a tile. The tools presented herein are refinements of recent ones used in the setting of cyclic groups; the structure of vanishing sums of roots of unity [17] is a prevalent notion throughout the text, as well as the structure of tiling subsets of integers [1]. We manage to prove the conjecture for cyclic groups of order p m q n , when one of the exponents is ≤ 6 or when p m−2 < q 4 , and also prove that a tiling subset of a cyclic group of order p m 1 p 2 • • • p n is spectral.