One of the biggest problems in I.C nowadays, among the few left who still play this game, is how to sustain the fun all round long. If you dont land in a top 50% fam these days your going to be left with maybe one guy in your whole family that you can have any sort of contact with rest of round while you idle bored..
We need to reinvent our whole system with these simple implementations  IMO.

Galaxy isnt fairly split of active/good players.
First of all, renders idea this round for pinwheel was in my opinion a great idea. We need to have a mixed entry system. Each round we ask for leaders of each fam. These leaders get to pick 2 players of their choice. The final say 3 members will be random. This means each fam has a strong basis for pwn and then it depends on luck with the randoms..
This will make the fams as even as possible.

Expo phase/gameplay.
I think there should be boundaries around each home system and every week the boundary gets smaller till you fill up systems.. and only when you own say maybe 80% of a system if becomes a guide marker that your area cant get smaller than, if you build up a circle of em, those are your areas to expo.. so it would actually be of interest to expo outwards to your furthest allowed core and build up from there..
Best way i can explain this is, imagine being on the map looking at your home system and the systems around it. Imagine a circle around part of the galaxy with your hs as the centre and all those systems inside this ring would be yours for exploring ONLY if you manage to explore them before the ring is lowered. The only way to combat the ring moving smaller is to have a fully closed ring of planets - this doesnt require every system to be in place it can work with the current spread out system where each system is a point for the ring to use an averaged radius. Other fams cant expo inside your ring, and you cant in thiers.. The better econ fams would be able to garner a bigger ring and thus a bigger secure core.
Econ would be so important for bor till expo phase neared.. And we would need to speed up bor substantially so that a 3 week round would have 1 week expo and 2 weeks full wars...
Allies would need to be disabled, IA not allowed. And no naps..
The galaxy would have one clause..
Once expo phase ended - you were only allowed to attack families your at war with. And you can only declare on at most two families at any given time.. War is allowed to be declared and retracted every 24 hours. (instead of the 48 hours delay in current game).
When expo phase ended there would be the fams who had better econ with maybe 20-40% bigger size and nw than those that didnt do so well.. These fams would have a strength advantage that wouldnt mean they autmatically win - pretty much everyone is a contender come war time - providing you havent completely ruined your infra) and then its frantic wars and strategic war decloration periods..
Such fun could be had instead of imperial ruin a round