Display Moreit was he who killed the yellow player from his alliance when he knew the time when he would be yellow
here are my fights for yesterday
Look, I'm famous. 
On topic
I think the big issue here is two fold.
1
Like Roz has been pointing out the game is structured to have diminishing returns. Both in terms of returned investment from buildings, and in terms of the x100 booster reducing.
(Personally, my natural lifespan in this game ends when I can't trigger the booster anymore. 1% growth is an increasingly difficult floating goal that will turn into a wall pretty soon I think.)
2
Scale. This like most things struggles with scale.
DA is at scale, HanaBi is at a similar scale.
Everyone else looks like new players compared to their points, and there's really no comparison.
AZs are a cool idea as much to prevent griefing as they are to compare average rank as you grow. But they struggle with the sheer sense of scale.
I could ruin any AZ15 player without much threat in the same way that DA could as Roz has been pointing out. In fact it would probably be easier because I get more spice production. But give them 2-3 months and they could take a swing back at me as Dschi has pointed out.
When it comes to DA the main difference is that she's out of reach.
Regardless of activity, the top 1% have to eat, especially with them not having the boosters, and there's noone else their size to eat.
Of these two issues scale is the killer I think.
Fixes would be focused on trying to keep people in neat little clumps, which is only harder to do with fewer players.
Fixes would also have to counteract principles like the Pareto Distribution. Both in terms of trying to encourage wider engagement and in terms of where all the resources end up.
Mechanically this can be theoretically done, but in practicality if run long enough something is going to escape and tear ahead.
I would rule out pruning the exceptions, because we do want to keep people in the game and punishing the people who succeed too much is usually a bad way to run things.
The only other easy answer is to limit time. Because in an endless period of time, there will always eventually be someone who sits in DA's spot. Someone who the other's can't compete with. If the system can't prevent that, or deal with it satisfactorily, then perhaps the system itself should reset.
Not actually recommending that, but it does strike me as one of the only ways of rebalancing this without a lot of creative restructuring.
The issue of diminishing returns is worth remembering though. This game isn't fun without a positive feedback loop.
Early on there's a lot of that. But as time goes on there gets less and less. I think that this game isn't really designed to have people play it for a long period of time.
I've picked this game up 3 times. 1st when it was self hosted, 2nd when it was hosted by bigpoint, 3rd at the end of January in this year. The first two times I never managed to unlock teleporting. I burnt out on the game well before that. Probably only had a 3 month stint each time round.
This time I stuck around because the x100 booster changed the game a lot.
It not only made things attainable in a reasonable timeframe, it also gave a daily progress goal that encouraged forward planning/preparation, and regular engagement. The only exception here is research, though I can understand why that caps out the way it does.
Pre x100 the regular engagement incentive was to catch the Escape Flights. And when you missed them and got your fleet wiped it was very hard to recover. With x100 though, there's a reason to be constantly doing the math on what else you need to do today, and if you do get your fleet wiped it gives you a means to recover. (Which I can attest to). Missing the 1% window and losing the booster hurts a lot, but if you've got your resources you can recover it without too much hassle. It allows players to build themselves up, without needing to raid others. Which means they can usually rebuild themselves after getting raided if they build for it.
These are good feedback loops to encourage engagement, and they are precisely why I'm still playing this today.
It makes some sense to not have everyone on x100, because then scale becomes an insane problem.
But if everything started from day 1 0 again, I would hate to play the game at x1 speed now.
Someone made the recommendation that the booster be tied to AZs, which could be a decent option to balance things especially in an early game while still keeping things sustainable into a late game.
Perhaps having a first-to-last type mechanic such as anyone in the #1 spot bein ineligible for the booster until they've been out of that spot for 24 hours. Could allow the leader to get knocked down a few pegs and keep things fresh and competitive overall.
Eventually though I think people will run out of AZs. Which brings the question back to time.
The only way I see the scale problem being properly resolved, once it's run away, is either by the server being refreshed or the far and away leader refreshing their account.
Mechanics might help prevent a similar situation, or at least slow it down. But I think it's still quite possible things will end up in somewhat comparable state eventually.
Neither of those are nice options. One means everyone loses everything, but at least it's fair. The other sees the leader lose everything, but is by its nature unfair. If the leader is happy where they are, then refreshing they aren't going to want to refresh their account. Forcing though would set a precedent that would likely not sit well on principle. As Roz has said, if the mechanics allow it we can't punish someone just for playing the game.
The only way it works out nicely is if that player decides they want a fresh start and voluntarily restarts their progress. Which is understandably not something a lot of people would want to do.
As a tl;dr
In this current situation. I think the only useful thing I've can offer is that the issue here is, I think, one of scale more than anything else.
How to deal with that, I don't know.
But with the boosters, I've made more progress playing this game this time than any other. Although I can't say whether I had more fun, it's certainly kept me playing longer.
But maybe most of players would like it and maybe it's kind of solution. But maybe if a parallel server was running for SI2 (something similar to Genesis but maybe for 3 months not a year? maybe that would be something, It's server that's getting reset but you don't really lose everything cause you can transfer built account to endless SI2).
This applies to both of you just in how to compare to everyone else in strength.
