Tl;dr
1. Be more public and friendlier with guild politics.
2. Spit up the top guilds into smaller guilds for a more even fleet distribution across the server.
3. Allow more newbies into these guilds; lose the elitism.
4. Bring in proper protectorates, so no guild gets crushed and destroyed.
5. These will probably never happen.
You’re entitle to disagree, but please don’t dismiss these until you’ve read the reasoning below.
I think part of the problem can be solved by looking at some numbers on different servers and looking at what is different about Delta compared to the more active servers, and change the way things are done here to try and model more active servers.
How do we decide which servers are best to try and model? This is quite a leap, but ignoring the younger servers is probably beneficial, as their activity isn't representative of a mature server, since the initial excitement and draw of a new server is enough to skew the activity. So let's compare the oldest seven servers, giving the picture on older and younger 'mature' servers than Delta. We'll look initially at the number of players and the number currently online. I'm in the UK, so admittedly probably not in the best place to see peak numbers, but it should give an indication of the activity.
So from this we can see that player numbers are on a pretty steady decline from Alpha downwards, with a minor unexpected rise at Epsilon. Ceti is pretty much the same as Delta, and Fenix and Gamma are much emptier than Delta. They do have slightly higher online players at 18:00 ST, but that could be due to the location of the players rather than activity and the numbers aren't high enough to be significantly different, so we'll ignore these two.
There is one clear winner in number of players and spectacularly better in terms of online players, almost four times higher, enough to take notice of. Alpha is the server with the best number of players and based on forum activity, the most active players out of these seven older servers and one which could be used as model to help revitalise Delta.
So what are the key differences between Alpha and Delta?
It's very difficult for me to analyse activity on the two servers without having a huge number of spies telling me the exact activity times for each server. Alpha players are more active on the forums and do talk to each other on the boards. Dialogue between guilds is often used on the forums to declare wars, as Ace mentioned. Additionally, the top guilds seem to be on friendly enough terms to actually talk about their wars, rather than the acerbic, barbed hostility that was prevalent on the guild boards back when I was in SIM. It was all ‘Crush the evil enemy, Destroy them all, once and for all, blah blah blah.’ I can’t comment on what the leaders were saying to each other, or how the other guilds in the conflict behaved, or what happened on the boards after I left, but it was so serious that it took the fun out of the game (which is why I left). So public and less aggressive dialogue between guilds might help. However, one massive difference I noticed was in the way the fleets are distributed on Alpha and Delta.
On Delta we have the vast majority of the server’s fleet locked up in the top 5 guilds. After that point the fleets of the subsequent ranks become pretty much meaningless. If all the fleet is in the hands of a few guilds, there can’t be a variety of meaningful conflicts. Certainly, any guild not in that top five (and even GRITS looks out of place) can’t enjoy the game, since the vast armadas of the top guilds are going to cut them back down to zero before they get a chance to grow. And with so few guilds, moving and actively fighting are difficult. Huge blobs become the only way to be safe, which breeds inactivity.
Alpha on the other hand, has a much more even distribution of fleet in its top thirty, as well having (when you add up the totals) over three times as much fleet on its server as Delta. It takes until rank 20 until you even see a guild with less than a billion in fleet total. This means more guilds are able to at least mount a solid defence against aggressors, which means more players can take part in conflicts without the worry of being squashed by bigger guilds, as the difference isn’t so drastically vast.
The way to evolve Delta into this kind of situation is to split up the top 5 guilds into at least 3 or four each. Then those guilds need to recruit from the lower levels. Teach them the ropes or at least give them a chance to become more than a snack. A player with 100m+ fleet hunting down a few hundred thousand in newbie meat isn’t a fight that the little guy can ever win. Neither can he avoid getting destroyed by moving his fleet around as the bigger guy can easily split his fleet up to corner him down. Having more guilds with more fleet reduces this issue. Obviously it’s down the competence of the guilds to look after their fleet, which means more players need to learn how to play. Inviting more newer players into these guilds will mean that more players become competent, which is better for the server, as they can grow their fleets and participate meaningfully in wars.
Obviously, it’s unrealistic to think that there will be 30 guilds which are all their ranks, fleets and activity will be biased. Neither is it conductive to an active server that only the top 30 guilds count. From experience playing on Alpha, I can say that the vast majority of guilds ranked 1-50 are involved in server politics and play an active role on the forums (albeit smaller guilds to a lesser degree than the top guilds). The relevance of the smaller ranks is due to the fact that most of them have a protector guild in the upper ranks. There is a sense of justice on Alpha in that the leaders of the top guilds don’t want a stagnant server where only the top 10 guilds are relevant, they want growth from the lower levels and activity. The protector arrangement is actually upheld as well; guilds who say they will defend their allies will generally go to war with the aggressor, as long as there was no valid reason for the attack on their protectorate. This is all made public on the forums so other players on the server are aware of the reasons. Having a protectorate (or many) is advantageous to the protector guilds as well. Active protectorates act as additional scouts when the larger guild is at war. Additionally, protectorate guilds can sometimes offer jump gates in convenient locations if there isn’t any guild jump gate available.
The suggestions I’m making for Delta are summarised in the tl;dr section at the beginning. I’m not saying all of them need to be followed, just that these are the reasons why Alpha, the oldest server, is so active many years after it started. A flaw in my own reasoning is that I don’t know what Alpha is like now, as I left there over a year ago. Additionally, I’m aware that splitting the top guilds is a contentious issue, which (in all likelihood) none of them will take up. Either way, with the vast majority of the server’s fleet locked up in these top 5 guilds, it will be entirely up to the leaders of those guilds to decide if they want to take any action. But why ruin a good thing, if you’re a top 5 guild, why would you take any action to change that?
So far, you've exhibited the strategic and tactical instincts of a pacifist lemming.
), or the highest eco. 
