I hope you are only trolling. I simply can't see how players without big bonus can keep up.
This was my problem all together with the QI. If you spend resources to donate (goods, supply/coins or troops) you hamper the development of your city. Same goes if you invest in red or blue boost.
If you can't invest supply/coins in developing your settlement, you are not able produce enough goods to buy space, troops to help fighting or even to donate.
Even specializing is hard, because you need to be online when your nodes come up.
The 1 second production times are nice, but that you have to wait 1 hour for troops, goods and worst, decorations, to get built is really bad.
Today on live was the morning of the last day -> aka level 12
I had to wait for the last production of the settlement to build up the last set of decorations. As they was finished (1 hour later), the blue node I was trying to help with, was already gone and the red one was completely out of reach for me, having specialised in blue. So almost 70k QA got waisted. I stand with my believe that this is bad design.
Instead of alternating the nodes, why not making competing lines (donations, red combat, blue combat) that bring to a specific boss, and from there to the farm nodes? This way a guild could specialize to conquer a level. There should be a bonus for every boss defeated, so there is a good incentive to do all 3 lines. This way anyone would have a target for his actions all the time, there would even be inner-guild competition to see which line gets finished faster or at all. The farmnode behind the boss should clearly be from the same type as the boss (donation, red combat, blue combat)